1941: The Last Tycoon
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
While Fitzgerald is perhaps best known for The Great Gatsby, which so many of us have read in AP English, The Last Tycoon was his final, unfinished ambitious book, and we selected it for 1941 because of its eerie echo with Fitgerald’s own end.
The Last Tycoon follows Monroe Stahr, a producer at the top of Hollywood’s golden age of the 30s. Stahr’s decline at the hands of ‘new Hollywood’, a more businesslike, investment-style environment is chronicled, as well as his young death. At 44, just after writing the first part of Chapter 6, Fitzgerald died of a heart attack. His notes and the completed portion of the book were published eventually. The current critical edition was released in 1993.