According to Publishers Weekly, the novel is "generally considered a roman à clef", with its lead character, Monroe Stahr, modeled after film producer Irving Thalberg.

[1] The story follows Stahr's rise to power in Hollywood, and his conflicts with rival Pat Brady, a character based on MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer.

It was adapted as a TV play in 1957 and an eponymous film in 1976, with a screenplay for the motion picture by British dramatist Harold Pinter.

Elia Kazan directed the film adaptation; Robert De Niro and Theresa Russell starred.

HBO cancelled the project and gave the rights to Sony Pictures, which produced and released the television series on Amazon Studios in 2016.

Set in the 1930s, The Last Tycoon traces the life of Hollywood studio manager Monroe Stahr, clearly based on Irving Thalberg (in charge of production at MGM), whom Fitzgerald had encountered several times.

The threesome decides on a spontaneous trip to the historic estate of former President Andrew Jackson, but on arrival, the attraction is closed.

Cecilia realizes that the message Schwartz gave to Wylie was in fact for Monroe Stahr, her father's business partner.

Stahr beholds two women desperately clinging to the head of a statue – finding one of them to be the spitting image of his late wife.

Stahr asks Cecilia to arrange for a meeting with a suspected communist who wants to organize a labor union within the film studio.

The contract killer finishes his job unhindered and leaves Cecilia both without a father and without a lover – the two men who meant the world to her.

[9] Fitzgerald wished to finish the novel by January 1941 and begin selling it by the fall of that year; however, he was behind schedule when he died in December 1940.

[12] The literary critic and writer Edmund Wilson, a close friend of Fitzgerald, collected the notes for the novel and edited it for publication.

[15] Following Fitzgerald's death, his editor Maxwell Perkins wrote a letter to Sheliah Graham, stating that "the first chapter alone is good enough to stand by itself.