Literary Criticism

Literary Criticism Research Project

The Last Tycoon

Plot of the Last Tycoon

In 1941 Scribner's published all there was of The Last Tycoon, along with part of Fitzgerald's notes for its completion, as edited by Edmund Wilson. The uncompleted novel closely matches Fitzgerald's description of it: it shows signs of being good; it reveals the author's firsthand knowledge of his subject (Fitzgerald had been in Hollywood three years); its mood, like that of a drama or of Fitzgerald's most perfectly realized book, The Great Gatsby, is upstream throughout. Only one notable novel about Hollywood, Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust, appeared before the time of Fitzgerald's death. West's subject was Hollywood but not exclusively the movie industry. All Hollywood is affected by the movies, of course; West dealt with the inhabitants of Hollywood who live on the periphery of the industry—his narrator is a minor artist at one of the studios, the girl in the book sometimes works as an extra, and there is a movie cowboy (Stern, 1994).

The main character, however, has nothing to do with the movies at all; he is one of the characteristic Hollywood immigrants, an Iowan, who, because his doctor had “an authoritative manner,” moved to California for a “rest.” West, then, chose for his characters people who might be called the more typical residents of Hollywood; certainly they outnumber movie magnates by several thousand to one. But West's people are never what we like to think of as normal. He refers to them as “the cream of American madmen”; their only solace is found in mob violence, cockfights, and bawdy houses. If West felt that the cream of American madmen were in Hollywood, he did not mean to imply that the rest of the American bottle is not liberally filled with milk. He had, several years earlier, indicated his predilection for madmen: his previous novel, Miss Lonelyhearts, though set in New York, is not one whit less grotesque, less downright horrible, than his book about Hollywood (Ginden, 1985).

Theme of the Last Tycoon

The Last Tycoon is primarily the story of Monroe Stahr, a producer who rules his studio “with a radiance that is almost moribund in its phosphorescence.” But one could easily say that the book has two heroes: one, Monroe Stahr, a creation of the author; the other, Hollywood, the radiant Hollywood of an earlier decade (Fitzgerald set the time of the action as 1935—“to obtain detachment”), which existed as a piece of history, ripe for anyone's artistic purposes. The tragedy in the book is a dual one: the doom of the movie industry is sealed by the decline of its last individualist; when Monroe Stahr dies, it becomes certain that the lavish, romantic past of the early Hollywood will never return. If The Great Gatsby can be viewed in broad interpretation as the tragedy of a man who outlives his dreams, The Last Tycoon can be thought of as a tragedy of a man who, for a time, remains great while his surroundings, the ...