[Thurber was an American humorist, cartoonist, short story writer, and playwright. In the following review, he evaluates the significance of The Last Tycoon and speculates that if Fitzgerald had lived to complete the novel, it would have been his best work.]

The novel F. Scott Fitzgerald was working on when he died in December, 1940, has been on the counters for three months now. His publishers tell me that it has sold only about 3,500 copies. This indicates, I think, that it has fallen, and will continue to fall, into the right hands. In its unfinished state, The Last Tycoon is for the writer, the critic, the sensitive appreciator of literature. The book, I have discovered, can be found in very few Womrath stores or other lending libraries. This, one feels sure, would have pleased Scott Fitzgerald. The book would have fared badly in the minds and discussions of readers who read books simply to finish them.

Fitzgerald's work in progress was to have told the life story of a big Hollywood producer. In the form in which the author left it, it runs to six chapters, the last one unfinished. There follows a synopsis of what was to have come, and then there are twenty-eight pages of notes, comments, descriptive sentences and paragraphs, jotted down by the author, and a complete letter he wrote outlining his story idea. All these were carefully selected and arranged by Edmund Wilson (who also contributes a preface) and anyone interested in the ideas and craftsmanship of one of America's foremost fiction writers will find them exciting reading.

No book published here in a long time has created more discussion and argument among writers and lovers of writing than The Last Tycoon. Had it been completed, would it have been Fitzgerald's best book? Should it, in a draft which surely represented only the middle stages of rewriting, have been published alongside the flawless final writing of The Great Gatsby? In the larger view, it is sentimental nonsense to argue against the book's publication. It was the last work of a first-rate novelist; it shows his development, it rounds out his all too brief career; it gives us what he had done and indicates what he was going to do on the largest canvas of his life; it is filled with a great many excellent things as it stands. It is good to be acquainted with all these things. In the smaller, the personal view, there is a valid argument, however. Writers who rewrite and rewrite until they reach the perfection they are after consider anything less than that perfection nothing at all. They would not, as a rule, show it to their wives or to their most valued friends. Fitzgerald's perfection of style and form, as in The Great Gatsby, has a way of making something that lies between your stomach and your heart quiver a little.

The Last Tycoon is the story of Monroe Stahr, one of the founders of Hollywood, the builder of a movie empire. We see him in his relation to the hundreds of human parts of the vast machine he has constructed, and in his relation to the woman he loves, and to a Communist Party organizer (their first contact is one of the best and most promising parts of the book). We were to have seen him on an even larger scale, ending in a tremendous upheaval and disintegration of his work and his world and a final tragedy. Fitzgerald would have brought it off brilliantly in the end. This would have been another book in the fine one-color mood of The Great Gatsby, with that book's sure form and sure direction. He had got away from what he calls the "deterioration novel" that he wrote in Tender Is the Night. He had a long way yet to go in The Lost Tycoon and his notes show that he realized this.

In one of these notes he tells himself that his first chapter is "stilted from rewriting" and he instructs himself to rewrite it, not from the last draft, but from mood. It is good as it stands, but he knew it wasn't right. In the last of the notes, Fitzgerald had written, with all the letters in capitals: "ACTION IS CHARACTER." A brilliant perfectionist in the managing of his ultimate effects, Fitzgerald knew that Stahr had been too boldly blocked out in the draft which has come to us. There was too much direct description of the great man. He fails to live up to it all. Such a passage as this would surely have been done over: "He had flown up very high to see, on strong wings, when he was young. And while he was up there he had looked on all the kingdoms, with the kind of eyes that can stare straight into the sun. Beating his wings tenaciously—finally frantically—and keeping on beating them, he had stayed up there longer than most of us, and then, remembering all he had seen from his great height of how things were, he had settled gradually to earth." There are other large, unhewn lines which would have given place to something else, such as this speech by one of his worshipers: "So I came to you, Monroe. I never saw a situation where you didn't know a way out. I said to myself: even if he advises me to kill myself, I'll ask Monroe." The Monroe Stahr we see is not yet the man this speaker is talking about. I would like to see him as he would have emerged from one or two more rewrites of what is here, excellent, sharp, witty and moving as a great deal of it is.

It must inevitably seem to some of us that Fitzgerald could not have set himself a harder task than that of whipping up a real and moving interest in Hollywood and its great and little men. Although the movie empire constitutes one of the hugest and therefore one of the most important industries in the world, it is a genuine feat, at least for me, to pull this appreciation of Bel-Air and Beverly Hills from the mind down into the emotions, where, for complete and satisfying surrender to a novel and its people, it properly belongs. It is a high tribute to Scott Fitzgerald to say that he would have accomplished this. I know of no one else who could.

James Thurber, "Taps at Assembly," in The New Republic, Vol. CVI, No. 6, February 9, 1942, pp. 211-12.