When, in the fall of 1936, Fitzgerald learned of [Irving] Thalberg's death, his first emotion had been one of relief. "Thalberg's final collapse," he wrote a friend, "is the death of an enemy for me, though I liked the guy enormously.… I think … that he killed the idea of either Hopkins or Frederick March doing Tender Is the Night." But whatever resentment he had felt toward Thalberg living soon evaporated after he had spent eighteen months on the M-G-M lot that no longer had Thalberg to guide its destiny. For, as Crowther documents again and again in his history of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, neither M-G-M nor the industry at large was able to find a successor to fill his place. Thalberg's death marked the ultimate triumph of the commercialism that for so many years he had successfully held at bay. The battle between the idealists still loyal to Thalberg and the cohorts of the New York financiers was still raging on the M-G-M lot when Fitzgerald arrived a year later. But the end was already in sight. It was this epic conflict, symbolized by the heroic figure of the dead producer, that Fitzgerald intended to portray in the most ambitious of all his books, The Last Tycoon.

The earliest evidence that Fitzgerald had been thinking of writing a new novel occurs in a letter to [Maxwell Perkins of Charles Scribner's Sons] dated October 16, 1936, in which he said he had one "planned, or rather I should say conceived," that would make a book "certainly as long as Tender Is the Night" and would take at least two years to write. He was too broke at the moment even to think of starting work on it, however. "I certainly have this one more novel [in me]," he wrote, "but it may have to remain among the unwritten books of this world."

Since this letter was written soon after news reached him about Thalberg's death, one wonders if the book he mentions was to have been based on Thalberg's career. The first mention of The Last Tycoon does not occur until December, 1938, over two years later, again in a letter to Max Perkins. By then, according to Sheilah Graham, Fitzgerald had already accumulated a large collection of notes for his novel, though he had not yet begun to write it. Knowing what we do about Fitzgerald's methods of working, it seems quite possible that the idea for The Last Tycoon had been taking shape gradually in Fitzgerald's mind for several years.

As part of his preliminary planning during 1937 and 1938, he not only took copious notes about the more technical aspects of M-G-M's complex operations, but he read everything that he could lay his hands on relating to Thalberg, including an excellent article on the M-G-M organization that had been published in a 1933 issue of Fortune, as well as an article on movie making written by Thalberg himself and published in The Saturday Evening Post that same year. "Thalberg has always fascinated me," Fitzgerald wrote Kenneth Littauer in 1939, in a letter outlining his plans for The Last Tycoon:

His peculiar charm, his extraordinary good looks, his bountiful success, the tragic end of his great adventure. The events I have built around him are fiction, but all of them are things which might very well have happened, and I am pretty sure that I saw deep enough into the character of the man so that his reactions are authentically what they would have been in life. So much so that he may be recognized—but it will be also recognized that no single fact is actually true … This is a novel not even faintly of the propaganda type. Indeed Thalberg's opinions were entirely different from mine in many respects that I will not go into. I've long chosen him for a hero (this has been in my mind for three years) because he is one of the half-dozen men I have known who were built on the grand scale.… Certainly if Ziegfeld could be made into an epic figure, then what about Thalberg who was literally everything that Ziegfeld wasn't?

Among Fitzgerald's notes was the draft of a letter he intended to send his good friend Norma Shearer when The Last Tycoon was finished, asking her permission to make use of some of the incidents from her husband's life. Although he had not known Thalberg well, Fitzgerald wrote, the impression he had made had been "very dazzling." And Monroe Stahr, the hero of his novel, had been inspired primarily by that impression, "though I have put in some things drawn from other men, and, inevitably, much of myself. I invented a tragic story and Irving's life was, of course, not tragic except his struggle against illhealth because no one has ever written a tragedy about Hollywood. A Star is Born was a pathetic and often beautiful story, but not a tragedy and doomed and heroic things do happen here."

But, although Fitzgerald saw the heroic aspects of Thalberg's career, he did not intend to gloss over Monroe Stahr's very real limitations as a human being. Stahr shares Thalberg's hypochondria, his ruthlessness and his impatience with mediocrity, his inability to relax, and his rather middle-class artistic taste. "Stahr left certain harm behind him just as he left good behind him," Fitzgerald reminded himself in one of his many notes.

Primarily, it was Thalberg's superb managerial abilities that held Fitzgerald's fascinated attention: Thalberg—the head of a huge collaborative enterprise; the artful juggler of budgets, casting lists, shooting schedules; the skilled supervisor of unit producers, directors, assistant directors, actors, cameramen, cutters, script writers, and craftsmen and technicians of every kind. Where was there a more striking illustration of the union of native managerial talent and modern mass-production techniques for the production of a unique work of art? From boyhood, Fitzgerald had always admired successful executives, from tycoons like James J. Hill and Grandfather McQuillan, and the politicos on the Princeton campus, to talented social impresarios and party-givers like Gerald Murphy.

It was not mere managerial talent alone that he admired, but the ability to use that talent in the creation of something of genuine aesthetic value—a magnanimous gesture, a heroic image, one of the Murphy's memorable Riviera parties, a colorful Broadway show, or a first-rate motion picture. Back in 1926, Fitzgerald had unsuccessfully tried to persuade Ring Lardner to write "the real history of an American [theatrical] manager—say Ziegfeld." But after he became acquainted with Thalberg, Ziegfeld's achievements paled by comparison.

Thus, it was important that Monroe Stahr's executive capabilities should be firmly established from the very beginning of the novel. In one of his notes for an episode in the first chapter, Fitzgerald said:

This will be based on a conversation that I had with Thalberg the first time I was alone with him in 1927, the day that he said a thing about rail-roads. As near as I can remember what he said was this:

We sat in the old commissary at Metro and he said, "Scottie, supposing here's got to be a road through a mountain and … there seem to be a half dozen possible roads … each one of which, so far as you can determine, is as good as the other. Now suppose you happen to be the top man, there's a point where you don't exercise the faculty of judgment in the ordinary way, but simply the faculty of arbitrary decision. You say, 'Well, I think we will put the road there,' and you trace it with your finger and you know in your secret heart, and no one else knows, that you have no reason for putting the road there rather than in several other different courses, but you're the only person that knows that you don't know why you're doing it and you've got to stick to that and you've got to pretend that you know and that you did it for specific reasons, even though you're utterly assailed by doubts at times as to the wisdom of your decision, because all these other possible decisions keep echoing in your ear. But when you're planning a new enterprise on a grand scale, the people under you mustn't ever know or guess that you're in doubt, because they've all got to have something to look up to and they mustn't ever dream that you're in doubt about any decision. These things keep occuring."

At that point, some other people came into the commissary and sat down, and the first thing I knew there was a group of four and the intimacy of the conversation was broken, but I was very much impressed by the shrewdness of what he said—something more than shrewdness—by the largeness of what he thought and how he reached it by the age of twenty-six, which he was then.

Gradually, as Monroe Stahr's image took shape in Fitzgerald's imagination, his resemblance to the historical Thalberg decreased, and he assumed a personality that was both more individualized and more representative. Fitzgerald began to think of him as embodying the virtues of the ideal executive, much as he had once conceived of Dick Diver as possessing heroic qualities of social leadership and charm. Turning from the facts of Thalberg's career, Fitzgerald investigated afresh the lives of several other well-known political and military leaders from the past. He read Philip Guedalla's biography of the Duke of Wellington, as well as A.H. Burne's study of three Civil War generals, Lee, Grant and Sherman, and J.A. Froude's Julius Caesar. In the last of these, the Victorian Froude portrayed the noblest Roman of them all as a nineteenth-century English liberal who fought in the name of the people against a corrupt, tyrannical, aristocratic senate that eventually betrayed and murdered him. Froude's Caesar was a skillful leader of men who possessed great executive abilities, and who, because of his insight into human nature, was able to direct the most diverse talents, welding them into a loyal, purposeful organization. Undoubtedly this interpretation of Caesar had a discernible influence on Fitzgerald's conception of Stahr. John O'Hara, visiting his old friend for the last time not long before Fitzgerald's death, was somewhat nonplused to find Fitzgerald constantly steering the conversation back to the exploits of Julius Caesar. He was further disconcerted when, at his departure, Fitzgerald insisted on lending him his old battered copy of Froude's book, so that O'Hara could read up on the subject.

Besides Stahr's affinities with Caesar, Fitzgerald also planned to emphasize certain parallels between his hero and two potent American political executives: Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson. Jackson was intended to illustrate the ruthless, autocratic elements in Stahr's personality. Old Hickory was the first strong American president, and Stahr was a general waging war on a dozen fronts at once—against lazy subordinates, jealous associates, penny-pinching financiers, power-hungry labor unions. In his single-minded struggle to maintain independent authority over his organization, Stahr—like any other general—found it necessary at times to permit himself a minor moral infraction for the sake of a larger good. Stahr's ruthlessness in this respect is brought out at the beginning of the story by his attitude toward Manny Schwartz, the worn-out producer whom he brutally snubs because he has lost his usefulness. Significantly, Schwartz soon afterwards commits suicide on the steps of "The Hermitage," Andrew Jackson's homestead near Nashville. But even Manny Schwartz perceives Stahr's heroic qualities. Before he kills himself he takes the trouble to send Stahr a message warning him of his many enemies, and praising him as "the best of them all."

Further on in the novel, Fitzgerald planned to bring out Stahr's affinities with the somewhat different, and more compassionate, figure of Abraham Lincoln. Stahr was also to be an expert political strategist, an artist in human relationships. Instead of removing his enemies, for instance, Stahr follows Lincoln's practice and keeps them where he can watch what they are doing. Like Lincoln, he knows how to use the element of play as a means of getting things done. At one stage in Fitzgerald's planning, he intended to have Stahr meet his death in front of the capitol in Washington. When Fitzgerald himself died, he was still not certain how he was going to work out the full implications of the Lincoln-Jackson association that he had so far indicated only in crude terms.

Fitzgerald also went out of his way to make Monroe Stahr's origins more lowly and impoverished than Thalberg's had been, in order to link his hero more firmly with the Lincolnesque myth of rags-to-riches success that he had already examined in The Great Gatsby. Here it is significant to recall that practically all of the manuscript of The Last Tycoon was written after the outbreak of the European War in September, 1939, and that Fitzgerald's beloved France and her allies were fighting for a cause Fitzgerald believed to be America's and his own. Back in 1928, in a newspaper interview foreseeing that crisis, he said that the nation's survival lay "in the birth of a hero who will be of age when America's testing comes." Such a leader, he believed, would probably emerge "out of the immigrant class in the guise of an East Side newsboy." Stahr, the poor tailor's son from the Bronx, derives from that Horatio Alger myth of success in which Fitzgerald still firmly believed.

But just as Monroe Stahr is a more complex and tragic symbol of that myth than the pathetic Gatsby had been, so Fitzgerald's view of his native country had changed drastically from that which he recorded in The Great Gatsby in the early 1920's. After the disillusioning expatriate years abroad, Fitzgerald no longer believed the United States to be that corrupted earthly paradise whose lost innocence he had hymned in the final sentences of The Great Gatsby. Instead, as the war clouds gathered, he saw both Stahr and the nation he represented as symbolizing the best values of the West. In one of the random notes lying between the pages of his Last Tycoon manuscript he said:

I look out at it and I think it is the most beautiful history in the world. It is the history of me and my people. And if I came here yesterday like Sheilah I should still think so. It is the history of all aspiration—not just the American dream but the human dream and if I came at the end of it that too is a place in the line of pioneers.

Stahr was intended to exemplify the ideal qualities of the successful American business executive. His business is that of applying native production-line techniques to the mass production of unique works of art, at the rate of one each week. He is par excellence that most indigenous of all our achievements, the American business manager. The nature and extent of his managerial talents are best seen in Chapters II and III, in which we are shown one of Stahr's typical business days. Both chapters deserve thoughtful study by any aspiring junior executive. Here we see Stahr confronting and solving one major problem in human relations after another; tactfully but effectively removing a director who has failed to manage his movie crew; reviving the jaded spirits of a team of script writers; persuading a group of hard-nosed New York financiers that the artistic prestige to be gained from an unconventional film will more than make up for its probable financial losses; smoothing the jangled nerves of a spoiled, neurotic actress who, for better or worse, is still a valuable piece of studio property that must be kept in condition; restoring the shattered self-confidence of a cameraman whose services are irreplaceable; winning the confidence of a high-priced British novelist, who cannot get through his head just what picture making is all about.

Stahr's success in this role is due to two particular gifts—his articulateness, and the interest in people as individuals that allows him, despite his own aesthetic limitations, to work effectively with creative artists. Both are superbly brought out in one of the best scenes in the book in which Stahr explains to George Boxley, the British novelist, how movie making differs from other kinds of creative activity. Stahr does so merely by telling Boxley a story consisting of a series of dramatic actions. When Boxley's interest is inevitably aroused, Stahr suddenly stops, and reminds him that all he had been doing is "making pictures." Not only has Stahr made his point, but Fitzgerald has demonstrated his hero's genius for communicating with temperaments radically different from his own. The episode itself consists entirely of dialogue and images, and reads so smoothly that it seems to be nothing more than a literal transcription of something Fitzgerald had once observed. But it is more than this. Although some of the inspiration came from a conference that he had once witnessed at which Aldous Huxley was present, Fitzgerald also built the episode from his memories of many other such conferences, all of them carefully reported in his notebooks. As an author, Fitzgerald resented the script writer's menial position in the studio as vehemently as George Boxley did. But he did not let this resentment color his treatment of Monroe Stahr's very different view of the script writer's responsibilities. And, at the end, Boxley is brought around to a grudging admiration of Stahr's managerial genius. Stahr also is an artist, Boxley acknowledges, but he

was an artist only, as Mr. Lincoln was a general, perforce and as a layman.… He had been reading Lord Chamwood and he recognized that Stahr like Lincoln was a leader carrying on a long war on many fronts; almost single-handed he had moved pictures sharply forward through a decade …

So far, the significance of Fitzgerald's portrait of Stahr as a heroic businessman has been overlooked by The Last Tycoon's admirers. Yet Monroe Stahr is one of the best renderings we have had in our literature of that most typical of all American figures. Traditionally, the businessman in literature has been portrayed almost solely as the object of scorn and ridicule. From Trimalchio and Pantaloon, Volpone and Monsieur Jourdain, Bouvard and Pecuchet, to Pere Grandet, and the Buddenbrooks and Forsytes, the business mentality has almost never been regarded as admirable. Even in the United States, that most businesslike of civilizations, the businessman has been portrayed more often as a Babbitt than a man of creative talent. Professor E. E. Cassady, after an exhaustive study of the dozens of American novels dealing with the subject, notes that the businessman has never been presented in our literature as "a large-minded, generous, disinterested, heroic character."

Henry James, with his characteristic insight, recognized the businessman as our civilization's most representative figure. But, lacking any practical contact with business itself, James was forced to admit (after several unsuccessful attempts to portray him in his fiction) that "before the American businessman I was absolutely and irremediably helpless." In more recent years, many other writers—Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Sinclair Lewis, among them—have tried to come to terms with him in their work. But even they were content, for the most part, to describe him outside business hours. We see the businessman boring his wife, ruining his children's lives, stumbling on the social ladder. But we rarely see him in the office where whatever ability and imagination he possesses would be most tellingly demonstrated. What sets The Last Tycoon apart from other novels about the businessman (with the exception, perhaps, of Howells' The Rise of Silas Lapham) is that Fitzgerald conceived of Monroe Stahr as a doomed and heroic figure whose heroism and whose doom were both the consequences of his success as a man of business. Stahr, in short, is the selfmade man whose destruction is brought about by the business organization that his talents and imagination have created. His studio has become so large and complex that he can no longer control its destiny. Instead, he is caught between the divisive forces that are fighting for domination. On the one hand there are the New York financiers and theater owners who provide the capital for Stahr's films. Interested only in profits, they see motion pictures solely as commodities to be made as cheaply and sold as dearly as possible. In the novel, forces representing these interests are scheming to replace Stahr by his more subservient and less competent rival, Pat Brady.

On the other hand, Stahr finds himself confronted by the ever growing threat of the labor unions. Here the danger is that his own artists will collectively force him to abandon the artistic standards he has hitherto defended against such odds. As a producer, Stahr knows that no picture can be better artistically than the director. Therefore the director must command absolute loyalty from his subordinates. This is the price for a first-rate product in any collaborative enterprise. Stahr insists on his sole right to dictate the artistic standards for the studio, but in exchange he shares his success generously with his artists.

But all this, he fears, is threatened by the growing power of the labor unions. They will insist on substituting watered-down, abstract, professional standards of competency for those that Stahr has created by himself. Moreover, the unions will divert his workers' attention from quality films to extraneous political, social, and economic considerations. This is implied by the figure of Brimmer, the Communist labor organizer who appears briefly in Chapter VI. The one thing both the unions and the New York moneymen share is their suspicion of Stahr's preoccupation with the artistic considerations of his job. This is a mystery neither is able to comprehend. Yet Stahr's battle is a hopeless one. In the past, he has been able to command his employees' loyalties by his personal friendship, but now the studio has become too large. Inevitably, his artists are beginning to look to one another for that respect and understanding they once received from Stahr. III, tired out by years of hard work, he no longer has the energy to resist the opposing forces closing in on him.

Although he is a doomed figure, it is wrong to say, as one commentator has, that Stahr therefore is "completely anomalous in the twentieth century." In a sense he is representative of the old-fashioned paternalistic employer. But as the head of a flourishing organization, Stahr surely has a more permanent significance. Every organization begins as the shadow of a man; but if it succeeds, it becomes an independent institution with an existence all its own. Then, like every other organism, it is responsible for its own survival. And in that struggle for survival no other organism, not even the individual who created it, becomes as important as itself. Stahr's predicament is thus a very familiar one. He is the individual locked in a struggle with the organization he has created, but which he no longer has the power to control. His plight is peculiarly relevant to our own super-organized society. Stahr, the tired businessman, grimly clinging to his job until he dies of a heart attack (or is carried away stubbornly sitting at his desk, like a recent president of Montgomery Ward)—is he really an outmoded hero? Fitzgerald's title, The Last Tycoon, was surely chosen for its ironic overtones. The last? How many other imaginative organizers—capitalistic, socialistic, communistic, or whatever their label—are destined to repeat Stahr's tragic destiny?

It is also ironic that Wylie White, the disillusioned screen writer who, of all the other characters in the book most resembles Fitzgerald, should be the person who understands Stahr best, and sees his tragic flaw. Stahr's strength, and his weakness, is that he cares too much. Herein lies his nobility and his pathos, his triumph and his doom. Instead of quitting while he is ahead, cutting his losses, and accepting the girl who loves him and wants to take care of him, Stahr insists on remaining at the helm of his sinking ship. Wylie White, like Fitzgerald, was "a free-lancer … [who] had failed from lack of caring." "But here," Wylie realizes, as he witnesses Stahr's tragedy, "here was Stahr to care for all of them."

Finally, quite apart from Stahr's role as the representative American business manager, Fitzgerald also thought of him as a moral symbol for the Hollywood film community itself—that glittering Babylon he had once described as "one of the most romantic cities in the world." Although Hollywood had defeated Fitzgerald as surely as it had destroyed Irving Thalberg, it continued nonetheless to fascinate him. Through the idea of Monroe Stahr, he hoped to be able to come to terms with his own ambiguous feelings about the screen colony.

He hoped to do this by telling Stahr's story from the point of view of someone as morally involved as Fitzgerald was with the problem of Hollywood. For this narrator he chose Cecilia Brady, the college-age daughter of Pat Brady, Stahr's bitterest enemy as well as his closest associate. Unlike both her father and Stahr, Cecilia has enjoyed the so-called "advantages." Born and bred a stone's throw from Sunset Boulevard, she is herself as much a Hollywood production as one of Stahr's "A" pictures. But she has also had the benefits of an exclusive Eastern girls' college. There, looking back on Hollywood from the greener perspective of a secluded New England campus, she has seen it in all its stark and pretentious ugliness. Although she can no longer accept the movie colony at its own inflated value, neither can she write it off as easily as her supercilious Eastern classmates. It is, after all, the most vital part of herself, and if Cecilia is ever to know herself, she must begin by understanding the culture that produced her.

In this sense, Cecilia Brady's desire to understand Monroe Stahr is the result of her need to comprehend Hollywood as a moral idea. How desperate that necessity was we can guess from the fact that in one version of The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald planned to have Cecilia tell Stahr's tragedy while she herself was dying of tuberculosis. In this version Stahr was to have been murdered.

Was there actually any moral justification for Hollywood, anyway? Nathanael West, a talented Hollywood writer whose work Fitzgerald admired, had asked this question in The Day of the Locust in 1939, and replied with an unqualified negative. The Hollywood he described in that novel had been a nightmare so horrible that only the distortions of surrealism were able to do his hatred of it justice. West's Hollywood is a moral waste land not unlike the waste land of Dr. T. J. Eckelburg—but West's hatred burned more intensely than Fitzgerald's. At the end of The Day of the Locust, West destroyed Hollywood in a righteous, Old Testament holocaust of smoke and flame.

Much as Fitzgerald admired this novel, he could not accept West's over-simplified solution to the problem. The Day of the Locust was "literature," he said, but "the underworld of literature." It was concerned only with partial truths. To a novelist like West, or Wylie White, or George Boxley, or even Fitzgerald himself, Hollywood might indeed seem like a nightmare world. But what were good writers like these doing wasting their time in Hollywood? For those who were morally involved in the community, what help was the literary hatred of an acknowledged outsider? To someone like Cecilia Brady, the judgments of the Wests and Boxleys were, at best, irrelevant. Wasn't there some positive value to justify the movie community's existence and hence, her own? In the story of Monroe Stahr she found that vindication—Stahr, "who almost single-handed … had moved pictures sharply forward … to the point where an 'A' production was wider and richer than that of the stage."

"At certain points," Fitzgerald says in another note for the novel, "one man appropriates to himself the total significance of a time or place." For Cecilia, Stahr was such a man. "You can take Hollywood for granted," she tells the reader on the first page of her story, "…or you can dismiss it with the contempt we reserve for what we don't understand. It can be understood, too, but dimly and in flashes. Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation in their heads. Perhaps the closest a woman can come to the set-up is to try to understand one of these men."

Was there no better way to get at the meaning of Hollywood? By an odd coincidence, another investigation also got under way in January, 1939—the same month that Fitzgerald was fired from his Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer job and began to make serious plans for writing The Last Tycoon. This second project was nothing less than a fulldress sociological analysis of the movie community by a team of expert social scientists, backed by a quarter of a million dollars of Carnegie and Rockefeller foundation money. It was inaugurated with all the ballyhoo of one of the picture industry's own "A" productions. Among its distinguished sponsors were such well-known scholars as Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, with Walter Wanger himself serving as the representative of the industry's highest echelons.

For the next two years a team consisting of two sociologists, an economist, a statistician, and various foreign language translators, industrial engineers, personnel experts, management consultants, and their assistants, thumped and prodded the recumbent form of the ailing movie industry. They read everything that had been written about the subject, recorded hundreds of interviews, and prepared, distributed, tabulated, and analyzed some forty-two hundred questionnaires. The results were summarized in a book by Leo Rosten, Hollywood: The Movie Makers, The Movie Colony, which was published in 1941, the same year that Fitzgerald's unfinished The Last Tycoon posthumously appeared.

The Rosten volume was in every way the most comprehensive and authoritative study that had thus far been made of the movie industry. Yet its 368 pages of text, plus an additional 78 pages of charts and appendices, did little more than confirm the diagnosis of Hollywood's ills that Fitzgerald had reached in less than one hundred pages of memorable prose. Central to both works was the idea that the key figure in Hollywood was the director (or the producer, when he also exercised the responsibility for the direction of a film). The future of the movie industry depended on the creative ability and freedom that these men brought to the making of pictures. Once they had been provided with the money and other resources (human and mechanical) necessary for a film, they should be allowed to exercise total authority, just as they should be expected to take full responsibility for the results. This is the same conclusion Bosley Crowther arrives at in his history of M-G-M, The Lion's Share. It was also the conclusion Fitzgerald had reached back in 1924 in "Why Only Ten Percent of the Movies Succeed," and it is the central theme of The Last Tycoon. Yet the film industry's failure to recognize this fact after Thalberg's death was the primary reason for its subsequent decline. World War II, when gas rationing temporarily provided the studios with a large captive audience, only postponed the inevitable day of reckoning. Television, instead of being responsible for Hollywood's downfall, merely administered the final coup de grdce.

Thus, The Last Tycoon—in spite of its fragmentary state—continues to be the most profound analysis we have had in fiction of the motion-picture industry. And writing this novel, under severe physical and emotional handicaps, constitutes Fitzgerald's most heroic act. Where the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundation scholars were treated with every courtesy, Fitzgerald was obliged to pursue his writing secretly, convinced that if news of his novel got about, he would be blackballed by the major studios. When he found out that Max Perkins had innocently told Charles Scribner of his plans, he wrote Perkins desperately, denying everything:

He [i. e., Mr. Scribner] seemed under the full conviction that the novel was about Hollywood and I am in terror that this misinformation may have been disseminated to the literary columns. If I ever gave such an impression it is entirely false: I said that the novel was about some things that had happened to me in the last two years. It is distinctly not about Hollywood (and if it were it is the last impression that I would want to get about).

So Fitzgerald struggled on alone in his doomed attempt to finish The Last Tycoon.

Henry Dan Piper, in his F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Portrait, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965, 334 p.