**A "mesmerizing and haunting" (The Boston Globe) 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 an asylum and his finances in ruin, he struggled to make a new start
as a screenwriter in Hollywood.
Those last three years of Fitzgerald's life are the focus of Stewart
O'Nan's graceful and elegiac novel West of Sunset. With flashbacks to
Fitzgerald's glamorous Jazz Age 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 their daughter,
Scottie. 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. Written with striking grace and subtlety,
this is a wise and intimate portrait of a man trying his best to hold
together a world that's flying apart.