The Last Tycoon: Francis Fitzgerald

These sumptuous new hardback editions mark the 70th anniversary of Fitzgerald`s death.

Their eyes `met and tangled. For an instant they made love as no one ever dares to do after. Their glance was slower than an embrace, more urgent than a call`.

A novel of the glittering decadence of Hollywood in its heyday, this was Fitzgerald`s last work and he died without completing it. The novel`s tragic tycoon hero is Stahr. Caught in the crossfire of his own effortless cynicism and his silent, secret vulnerability, Stahr inhabits a world dominated by business, alcohol and promiscuity. If there is a moral or social necessity to film-making in this West Coast never-never land, Stahr does not always believe in it. If there is love he does not always see it. The sharpness of Fitzgerald`s prose, the steely simplicity of his style, give a cutting edge to this study of Hollywood in the thirties, from which Fitzgerald draws a painfully bitter-sweet love affair and bids his own poignant farewell to the Great American Dream.