Full Description
Even in its incomplete form The Love of The Last Tycoon has achieved a reputation as the best novel about Hollywood. When F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940 he had written seventeen of thirty projected episodes. In 1941 the 'unfinished novel' was published in a text for general readers by Edmund Wilson under the title The Last Tycoon. For more than fifty years this edition, which is not true to the original work in progress, has been the only one available. This critical edition of The Love of The Last Tycoon, first published in 1994, utilises Fitzgerald's manuscript drafts, revised typescipts, and working notes to establish the first authoritative text of the work. The volume includes a detailed history of the gestation, composition, and publication of the novel; full textual apparatus with editorial notes; fascimiles of the drafts; and explanatory notes on topical allusions and historical references for contemporary readers. The reconstruction of Fitzgerald's plan for the thirteen unwritten episodes is particularly useful. F. Scott Fitzgerald's incomplete masterpiece is restored its 1940 state, and thus made fully accessible to a cross-section of readers.
Contents
Acknowledgments; F. Scott Fitzgerald selected chronology: 1927-41; The geography of The Love of the Last Tycoon; Introduction; The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western; Selected Fitzgerald working notes: facsimiles; Inventory of drafts; Textual apparatus: Editorial emendations in the base-texts; Textual notes; Fitzgerald's revisions, corrections, and annotations in the latest typescripts; Wilson's alterations in the latest typescripts; Variants in the scribners setting copy and the first printing; Word division; Explanatory notes; Appendix 1. The sanitarium frame; Appendix 2. Specimen working drafts.
