In Hollywood one day last month, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald phoned the doctor to put off his visit until next day. Fitzgerald was writing, did not want to be disturbed. He kept on writing the next morning, too. When the doctor got there a little later, Novelist Fitzgerald's heart had stopped.
Nostalgic Fitzgerald fans realized that the "lost generation" had died with him. They wondered what he had been racing death to write. Last week they penetrated several wrappings of reticence to find out. Fitzgerald was writing a novel about Hollywood. Its hero was a movie producer. As "a gag title," Fitzgerald called his novel The Love of the Last Tycoon—A Western, expected it to run a little longer than The Great Gatsby (218 pages). He had begun writing it some five months before his death. Though secretive about his progress, he mentioned the novel in letters to Scribner's Editor Maxwell Perkins and to Edmund Wilson, Fitzgerald's fellow Princetonian and "intellectual conscience." Perkins had even seen the first chapter, liked it.
At the time of his death Fitzgerald had completed an outline and 37,000 words of Draft No. 1, which he expected to finish within a month. Friends were sure The Love of the Last Tycoon would be published in some form, perhaps under some other title.
Others thought that after the typical Fitzgerald ending of Fitzgerald's life, a Fitzgerald novel reworked by somebody else might come as something of an anticlimax. They wondered who could rework it anyway. Nathanael West (The Day of the Locust), Fitzgerald's great & good friend, for whose literary recognition he generously pled in his introduction to the Modern Library edition of The Great Gatsby, was dead too. At the home of Nathanael West and his wife, Eileen McKenney, Fitzgerald attended his last party (and his first in many a day) on Friday, Dec. 13. Day after Fitzgerald died, Novelist West and Eileen McKenney were killed in an auto crash (four days before the play based on Ruth McKenney's My Sister Eileen became a Broadway hit).
Perhaps John O'Hara (Appointment in Samarra) could polish off the script. But though characters in O'Hara novels sometimes refer to each other as "Fitzgerald characters," O'Hara is more a Hemingway derivative, belongs less among the sad young men than with U. S. Literature's dead-end kids : James M. Cain ( The Postman Always Rings Twice), Horace McCoy (They Shoot Horses, Don't They?), pseudonymous Richard Hallas (real name Eric Knight).
Fitzgerald, in fact, was the sole author of his own dilemmas. He was the last survivor of a generation that never grew up—or rather of its period of hectic ar rested development. This period he had fixed memorably in a series of remarkable prose movies: This Side of Paradise, Flappers and Philosophers, The Beautiful and Damned, Tales of the Jazz Age, The Great Gatsby, All the Sad Young Men.
When the jazzed arteries had begun to calcify, and the bravely broken hearts began to miss a beat, Fitzgerald slowed down too. Between The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934), Fitzgerald published no novels. For the last three years he lived in Hollywood, tranquilly, soberly, almost clinically (friends claim he had not had a drink for years), but also somewhat like the last passenger pigeon in the Cincinnati zoo.