The final year of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life was both a tragedy and, in a more obscure sense, a triumph. Fitzgerald, who died of a heart attack at 44 in 1940, was sober and writing well when he died, and he still knew what he was: the author of the ageless The Great Gatsby (1925) and “in a small way, an original.” He hoped that his novel in progress, The Last Tycoon, set in the Hollywood that he had come to know over several years of screenwriting work, would restore his fading reputation. He did not live to complete that novel, leaving a manuscript that Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli called “the most promising—and the most disappointing—fragment in American fiction.”
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