Last Tycoon, The

a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1941. The novel, which Fitzgerald began writing in 1939, was left unfinished on his death in December 1940 and it was the critic Edmund Wilson who assembled the text (including an extensive apparatus of notes) for publication. The novel draws on Fitzgerald's familiarity with Hollywood and concerns Monroe Stahr (a character loosely based on the MGM producer Irving Thalberg), an autocratic and influential film producer. Much of the novel is narrated from the point of view of Cecilia Brady, the daughter of one of Stahr's partners, and hopelessly in love with Stahr, but Fitzgerald's handling of her is not particularly accomplished and there are unsatisfactory shifts from first to third person in the text which, no doubt, Fitzgerald would have sought to revise had the novel been completed. The Love of The Last Tycoon (1994), edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, offers an authoritative, scholarly edition of Fitzgerald's text.