F. Scott Fitzgerald's Unfinished Hollywood Novel

· 08/13/2017 · Michael Schmitt

Anne Margaret Daniel writes about F. Scott Fitzgerald's final unfinished novel in the Huffington Post. Between his arrival in Hollywood in 1937 and his death towards the end of 1940, Fitzgerald had an incomplete first draft of "The Last Tycoon."

[It's] a story of celluloid and cyphers — a Gatsbyesque man who had renamed himself and risen to unsupported, unsupportable heights on an industry based upon flickering images in the dark — a man whose dreams were full of ghosts in the face of hard bright everyday realities...

It is set in a Los Angeles now gone with the wind, where Malibu is composed of "gaudy shacks and fishing barges" and Santa Monica has just begun to be settled, with "the stately homes of a dozen picture stars, penned in the middle of a crawling Coney Island." The movie business is difficult, and love far more so.

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