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  • Published: 8 November 2011
  • ISBN: 9780141194080
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 198
  • RRP: $42.99

The Last Tycoon




A novel of the glittering decadence of Hollywood in its heyday, this was Fitzgerald's last work and he died without completing it.

These sumptuous new hardback editions mark the 70th anniversary of Fitzgerald's death.
Their eyes 'met and tangled. For an instant they made love as no one ever dares to do after. Their glance was slower than an embrace, more urgent than a call'.
A novel of the glittering decadence of Hollywood in its heyday, this was Fitzgerald's last work and he died without completing it. The novel's tragic tycoon hero is Stahr. Caught in the crossfire of his own effortless cynicism and his silent, secret vulnerability, Stahr inhabits a world dominated by business, alcohol and promiscuity. If there is a moral or social necessity to film-making in this West Coast never-never land, Stahr does not always believe in it. If there is love he does not always see it. The sharpness of Fitzgerald's prose, the steely simplicity of his style, give a cutting edge to this study of Hollywood in the thirties, from which Fitzgerald draws a painfully bitter-sweet love affair and bids his own poignant farewell to the Great American Dream.

  • Published: 8 November 2011
  • ISBN: 9780141194080
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 198
  • RRP: $42.99

About the author

F Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 -1940) is widely considered the poet laureate of the Jazz Age. He wrote many short stories and four novels, This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and the Damned, Tender is the Night and The Great Gatsby. An unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, was published posthumously.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in St Paul, Minnesota, and went to Princeton University, which he left in 1917 to join the army. He was said to have epitomized the Jazz Age, which he himself defined as 'a generation grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken'. In 1920 he married Zelda Sayre. Their traumatic marriage and her subsequent breakdowns became the leading influence on his writing. Among his publications were five novels, This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby, The Beautiful and the Damned, Tender is the Night and The Last Tycoon (his last and unfinished work); six volumes of short stories and The Crack Up, a selection of autobiographical pieces.

Fitzgerald died suddenly in 1940. After his death The New York Times said of him that 'He was better than he knew, for in fact and in the literary sense he invented a 'generation'. . . he might have interpreted and even guided them, as in their midle years they saw a different and nobler freedom threatened with destruction.'

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