West of Sunset

In 1937, F. Scott Fitzgerald arrived in Hollywood as a troubled, uncertain man, his literary success long over, his wife Zelda consigned to a mental asylum, and his finances in ruins. Stewart O'Nan's novel focuses on the last three years of Fitzgerald’s life, which ended with his death in December 1940. Struggling to make a new start as a screenwriter at the MGM lot, he tries to maintain a semblance of family life with his absent wife and daughter, Scottie. The story follows him as he falls in love with the brassy gossip columnist Sheilah Graham and begins work on his final, unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon. With appearances by figures like Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway, and Humphrey Bogart, the novel brings the Golden Age of Hollywood vividly to life, offering an intimate and sympathetic portrait of a man trying his best to hold together a world that was falling apart.

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