“Tired Hedonists” in Los Angeles: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Last Tycoon

This article focuses on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final unfinished novel The Last Tycoon. It illustrates how the novel advances the tropes of the decadent movement as an ironic way to evoke Hollywood and, at its centre, the fictional movie mogul Monroe Stahr. In so doing, I situate the novel and its author in the context of American engagements with decadence in the early twentieth century, and show how Fitzgerald creates a distinctly modern American mode of the phenomenon. On this basis, I argue that The Last Tycoon illustrates Fitzgerald’s continued engagements with the concerns and aesthetics of the decadent movement, despite his own attempts to distance himself from it. Indeed, decadence provides a ready-made aesthetic framework in which to comprehend Hollywood in the 1920s and 1930s, at the same time as cinematic aesthetics, such as popular music, enable Fitzgerald to expand the imaginative scope of decadence.