The Last Tycoon [antikvár]

FOREW ORD Scott Fitzgerald died suddenly of a heart attack (Dcccmbcr 21, 1940) the day after he had written the first épisode of Chapter 6 of his novel. The text which is given here is a draft made by the author after considérable rewriting; but it is by no means a finished version. In the margins of almost every one of the episodes, Fitzgerald had written comments—a few of them are included in the notes—which expressed his dissatisfaction with them or indicated his ideas about revising them. His intendon was to produce a novel as concentrated and as carefully constructed as The Grcat Gatsby had been, and he would unquestionably have sharpened the effect of most of these scenes as we have them by cutting and by heightening of color. He had originally planned that the novel should be about 60,000 words long, but he had written at the time of his death about 70,000 words without, as will be seen from his oudine, having told much more than half his story. He had calculated, when he began, on leaving himself a margin of 10,000 words for cutting; but it seems certain that the novel would have run longer than the proposed 60,000 words. The subject was here more complex than it had been in The Great Gatsby—the picture of the Hollywood studios required more space for its présentation than the background of the drinking life of Long Island; and the characters needed more room for their development. This draft of The Last Tycoon, then, represents that point in the artist's work where he has assembled and organized his material and acquîred a firm grasp of his theme, but has not yet brought it finally into focus. It is remarkable that, under these circumstances, the story should have already so much power and the character of Stahr emerge with so much intensity and reality. This Hollywood producer, in his misery and grandeur, is certainly the one of Fitz-