West of Sunset
West of Sunset
Author: Stewart O'Nan
Desc: A “rich sometimes heartbreaking” (Dennis Lehane) novel of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last years in Hollywood In 1937 F. Scott Fitzgerald was a troubled uncertain man whose literary success was long over. In poor health with his wife consigned to a mental asylum and his finances in ruins he struggled to make a new start as a screenwriter in Hollywood. By December 1940 he would be dead of a heart attack. Those last three years of Fitzgerald’s life often obscured by the legend of his earlier Jazz Age glamour are the focus of Stewart O’Nan’s gorgeously and gracefully written novel. With flashbacks to key moments from Fitzgerald’s past the story follows him as he arrives on the MGM lot falls in love with brassy gossip columnist Sheilah Graham begins work on The Last Tycoon and tries to maintain a semblance of family life with the absent Zelda and daughter Scottie. Fitzgerald’s orbit of literary fame and the Golden Age of Hollywood is brought vividly to life through the novel’s romantic cast of characters from Dorothy Parker and Ernest Hemingway to Humphrey Bogart. A sympathetic and deeply personal portrait of a flawed man who never gave up in the end even as his every wish and hope seemed thwarted West of Sunset confirms O’Nan as “possibly our best working novelist” (Salon).