The Love of the Last Tycoon
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| Author | F. Scott Fitzgerald |
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| Cover Artist | Kinuko Y. Craft (Scribner's 2003 paperback edition) |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Charles Scribner's Sons |
| Released | 1941 |
| Media Type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 163 pp (paperback edition) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-521-40231-X (Cambridge University edition) ISBN 0-684-15311-4 (Scribner hardcover edition) |
The Love of The Last Tycoon: A Western is a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
[edit] Plot introduction
The novel centers on the life of film executive Monroe Stahr in Hollywood in the 1930’s. Stahr is modelled on the life of film executive Irving Thalberg, though only in ideas and ambitions, not in actual life events. The notes for the novel were collected and edited by the literary critic Edmund Wilson, who was a close friend of Fitzgerald, and the unfinished novel was published in 1941 as The Last Tycoon. Critics have looked upon this work favorably; some have even speculated that this could have surpassed Fitzgerald's masterpiece The Great Gatsby (1925) had it been completed.
[edit] Explanation of the novel's title
The Love of the Last Tycoon was originally published as The Last Tycoon, though there is now critical agreement that Fitzgerald intended the former as the title. It wasn't until the 1993 publication, as part of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, that the work first appeared as The Love of the Last Tycoon. According to Bruccoli, Fitzgerald wanted the title to "sound like a movie title and completely disguise the tragic-heroic content of the book".
[edit] Plot summary
The narrative begins with Celia, Wylie White and Mr. Schwartze on a plane headed toward Hollywood. At first, the men do not know that Celia is the daughter of a famous producer. She is ignored until the realization is made, at which point they become eager for conversation. The plane makes an emergency landing in Nashville due to a storm, leading the three to take off on an adventure to The Hermitage, home of Andrew Jackson, which is closed when they arrive. Celia and Wylie have grown close by this time and sit talking in front of the house but Mr. Schwartze goes off on a hunt for a way inside. By the time he finds his way back to the others he has fallen and hit his head. Soon it is time to go to the plane, but he wishes to stay behind, where he kills himself.
Monroe Stahr makes his first appearance on the plane as Mr. Smith, whom Celia mistakes for the co-pilot. He reappears back on the plane talking to Wylie about a letter given to him by Mr. Schwartze. This is the first glimpse of the conspiracy going on with Monroe Stahr in the movie industry and of Celia’s infatuation with him.
In Hollywood there is a large earthquake that occurs as Celia goes to collect Pat Brady, her father, who is late for his birthday party. She walks into his office as he and Jaques La Borwits are discussing Stahr. It second indication of conspiracy in the business and the first in which he is involved. They set off in search of Stahr. Stahr believes the earthquake to have beeen part of a dream, continuing to do so until he hears reports of flooding all over the studio. Going to check out the flood they find two women on a large head depicting Siva floating in the middle of the water. The men are at first angry, but Stahr loses all emotion except awe when finding that one of the women is an exact double of his deceased wife Minna Davis.
Stahr gets his workers to start searching for the woman that he remembers at the flood. When they finally track her down, it turns out she is the friend of the girl that Stahr remembered. Neither of the girls want to be with Stahr.
Celia repeatedly tries to get Stahr to think of her as more than his associates daughter, but as a prospect for marriage. Though she flirts with him, Stahr maintains that he is too wrapped up in pictures for anything else.
Stahr spends most of his time working, dealing with many people in the innovative ways that brought him to the top of the industry. Red Ridingwood, a director, has proved a disappointment, so Stahr removes him from a film, replacing him with another. When the eyesight of Stahr's favorite camera man begins to fail, he sends the man to an occulist, clears up rumors, and returns him to work. Many of Stahr's screenwriters become upset with his system of having multiple writers on one script. He reassures them, motivating the writers to continue to work.
Stahr runs into Kathleen at a dance and they talk until Stahr frightens Kathleen with his intensity. For a time, Stahr sits at his expected table of higher end people, including Celia, until he sees Kathleen start to leave and convinces her to go out with him. Celia takes the narrative over now, and Stahr dances with her while Wylie tries to find out who Kathleen was.
Stahr and Kathleen meet in a car park the next day, go out to lunch and then to Stahr’s unfinished house, feigning formalities all the while. They eat dinner in a drugstore before Stahr takes Kathleen back to her house. There they kiss before returning to Stahr’s unfinished house on the beach. After making love a couple of times the two share more of their lives and walk along the beach They encounter an African American who challenges Monroe’s ideas about pictures. After taking Kathleen home his housekeeper finds a letter on his car from Kathleen in which she reveals her engagement to another man.
Meanwhile Celia has decided to help old actors who are down on their luck in Hollywood and goes to her father for help. Walking into his office unannounced, she finds his naked secretary in the closet. Celia covers her with a rug and runs out.
After five days, Kathleen calls Stahr. They make plans to see each other over the weekend, but before Stahr can act on them Kathleen's fiance shows up and the two are married.
Stahr wants to speak with a member of the Communist Party and calls up Celia to arrange a meeting. Celia arranges for Stahr to meet Brimmer. The conversation is pleasant at first, but Stahr gets drunk, hits Brimmer, ends up getting beat up. This is the beginning of Stahr and Celia being together and marrying, which ends the novel, but Fitzgerald had future plans for the characters that he never got to write due to the fact he died before finishing the novel.
[edit] Characters in "The Love of the Last Tycoon"
- Celia Brady – Producers daughter
- Monroe Stahr- Famous producer
- Pat Brady- Celia’s father and Stahr’s associate
- Minna Davis- Stahr’s deceased wife
- Kathleen Moore- Woman who looks like Minna
- Wylie White- Screenwriter
- Rose Meloney- Screenwriter
- George Boxley –Screenwriter
- The Marquands- Husband and wife screenwriter team
- Schwartze- Failing movie company head
- Birdy Peters- Brady’s Secretary
- Maude – Brady’s secretary
- Rosemary Schmiel- Brady’s secretary
- Miss Catherine Doolan- Stahr’s secretary
- Mort Flieshacker- Company lawyer
- Jaques La Borwits- Assistant producer
- Robby Robinson- Electrical trouble-shooter
- Pete Zavras- Old camera man
- Mike VanDyke- Gagman
- Reinmund- Supervisor
- Bradogue- Director
- Joan Broaca- Director
- Red Ridingwood- Director
- Prince Agge- Prince of Denmark
- Edna Smith- Kathleen’s friend
- Brimmer- Communist Party member
- The American- Kathleen’s betrothed
- Martha Dodd- Old actor
- Baer- Stahr’s doctor
[edit] Point of View
Fitzgerald wrote The Love of the Last Tycoon through first person omniscient, through the eyes of Celia Brady, though some of the novel shifts into first person omniscient being events that Celia cannot be able to know about. The whole story is supposed to be told by Celia, alternating the heaviness of her emotions in different sections of the novel. Occasionally a scene will be replayed twice, through Celia’s eyes and through a third parties to give a different view, convey different emotions, or show different things that happened. Fitzgerald is very descriptive in conveying feelings through his omniscient narrator which is important when so much is going on through different eyes.
The tone that Fitzgerald seems to have is a bleak one because of the negative words he uses when discussing aspects of the American Dream. When talking about Stahr’s unfinished house Fitzgerald focuses on words such as "feeble", "wound", and "barren" creating a feeling of a bare landscape that someone could barely put up a house on, which Stahr is doing. Fitzgerald draws the reader into Kathleen and Stahr’s love, and then abruptly ends it twice creating a desolate and lonely feeling towards that dream. Fitzgerald sticks hints throughout the novel that Stahr will work hard towards the American Dream but will ultimately fail. However, the overall tone of the prose in the novel is a warm one, a defining quality in much of Fitzgerald’s writing.
[edit] Setting
This novel takes place in Hollywood in the late 1930s. Through the songs that are mentioned throughout the novel one can tell that the time is someplace between 1933 and 1935 to 1939, though some references to other events, such as Superman and Mrs. Simpson throw off the time a bit. Because it took time for Fitzgerald to plan the novel and episodes, then write them it can be expected that some chronological details of be mixed up a bit. Critics think that Fitzgerald wanted the novel to be set about five years previous to composition, which would have been the summer of 1936, fitting most of the time and details. Fitzgerald does not go into scenery in most of the novel, focusing more on actions. He was writing of the movies and therefore wrote in more of a movie like fashion, focusing on the actions of characters and their words and feelings then the scenery.
[edit] Major themes
In The Love of the Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald explores the Failure of the American Dream. Monroe Stahr has an unfinished house, he lives for his job, but is dying because of it through a heart condition, he can’t get the woman he loves, and therefore ends up marrying another girl, all showing that he is victim to failing the American dream even though he seems to be at the top. Stahr is at thriving in the business world but Fitzgerald hints towards conspiracy and shows that Stahr’s health is failing, presenting that one cannot be at the top forever. His house is unfinished and unroofed, turning out to be an escape for his romance with Kathleen, but she is taken off by the American and Stahr is left in his loneliness. Fitzgerald and Celia Brady present the idea that being married to ones work is failure of the American dream at its worst, because then one has no room to live. Stahr doesn’t get this with Kathleen, though he does live outside the movies more with her, upon loosing her he quickly rebounds to Celia, but since he does not love her it is just as tragic and therefore still failure.
[edit] Allusions/references to other works
The Love of the Last Tycoon alludes to many other works depending on the characters that are interacting. Celia mentions up fairy tales such as Cinderella and Alice in Wonderland. Kathleen and Stahr discuss writers such as Spengler. Zavras brings up Greek mythology. Most of the allusions in Tycoon are used in description of people or places.
[edit] Allusions/references to actual history, geography and current science
There are many references to famous Hollywood actors inserted in The Love of the Last Tycoon as well as other notably famous people of the time such as the Duke of Windsor. Fitzgerald slips allusions into the writing as part of the history because though the story is fiction he has put some real events into its timeline to make it feel as though it could have happened just a few years back. There are small references to the War and the Depression, Black and Tans, and The Holocaust which give more of a sense of time and history.
[edit] Awards and nominations
The Love of The Last Tycoon has won the Choice Outstanding Academic Books award of 1995.
[edit] Film, TV or theatrical adaptations
The novel was adapted for the screen and released as The Last Tycoon in 1976. It was director Elia Kazan's last film and starred Robert DeNiro as Monroe Stahr, Robert Mitchum, Jeanne Moreau, Morgan Farley, Theresa Russell, Donald Pleasence and Jack Nicholson. Nobel Prize winning playwright Harold Pinter adapted the novel for the screen. It was produced by Sam Spiegel.
[edit] Publicatrion details
- 1993, USA, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-40231-0, hardcover
- 2003, USA, Charles Scribner’s Sons, ISBN 0-02-019985-6, paperback
[edit] Sources, references, external links, quotations
- "The maturing of F. Scott Fitzgerald". Alan Margolies, Twentieth Century Literature, Spring 1997.
| F. Scott Fitzgerald Books |
| Novels: This Side of Paradise | The Beautiful and Damned | The Great Gatsby | Tender is the Night | The Love of the Last Tycoon |
| Short Story Books: Flappers and Philosophers | Tales of the Jazz Age | All the Sad Young Men | Taps at Reveille | The Pat Hobby Stories | The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |
| Other works: The Princeton Tiger | The Vegetable | The Crack-Up | Winter Dreams | Babylon Revisited | Bernice Bobs Her Hair | The Cut-Glass Bowl | Benediction | Head and Shoulders |
