Since first stirrings of F. Scott Fitzgerald revival in 1940s, readers have been fascinated by oppositions in his work and character. Critics from several different generations have noted how Fitzgerald used his conflicts to explore origins and fate of American dream and related idea of nation.(1) contradictions he experienced and put into fiction heighten implications of dream for individual lives: promise and possibilities, violations and corruptions of those ideals of nationhood and personality dreamed into being, as Ralph Ellison phrased it, of chaos and darkness of feudal past.(2) Fitzgerald embodied in his tissues and nervous system fluid polarities of American experience: success and failure, illusion and disillusion, dream and nightmare. did not care what it was all about, Hemingway's Jake Barnes confessed in Sun Also Rises. All I wanted to know was how to live in it.(3) Fitzgerald, who named and chronicled that brash, schizophrenic decade, was no stranger to dissipation of values and pursuit of sensation in Jazz Age of 1920s. But for all that, he strained to know what all about and how to live in it. To him, Hemingway's it was not simply existence and soul's dark night of melancholia and despair. It also stood for American reality that, combined with an extraordinary gift for hope and a romantic readiness,(4) led to extravagant promise identified with America and intense, devastating loss felt when dream fails in one or another of its guises. Face to face with his own breakdown, Fitzgerald traced his drastic change of mind and mood in his letters and Crack-Up pieces. From conviction during his amazing early success in his 20s that was something you dominated if you were any good,(5) Fitzgerald, at end of his life, came to embrace the sense that essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat, and that redeeming things are not `happiness and pleasure' but deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.(6) Abraham Lincoln was Fitzgerald's American exemplar of this wise and tragic sense of life (Turnbull, Letters [L] 96). And in Last Tycoon (LT) he associates Monroe Stahr's commitment to lead movie industry closer to ideal mix of art and entertainment with Lincoln's creative response to contradictions of American democracy embodied in Union. Fitzgerald's invocation of Lincoln recalls proud and humble claim he made to his daughter from Hollywood. don't drink, he wrote; then, as if freed from a demon's grasp, he recounted inner civil war he fought to keep his writer's gift intact: am not a great man, but sometimes I think impersonal and objective quality of my talent and sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its have some of epic grandeur. Some sort he qualifies, as it! preparing for ironic, self-deflating admission in next sentence. Anyhow after hours I nurse myself with delusions of that sort (L 62, 61). But Fitzgerald did preserve essential value of his talent; pages he left confirm that. Like Lincoln who lived only long enough to sketch out what a truly reconstructed nation might look like, Fitzgerald was defeated in his attempt to finish his last novel. Yet what he wrote all more poignant because, finished, Last Tycoon might have recast and reformulated intractable oppositions of Great Gatsby and Tender Is Night. The test of a first rate intelligence, Fitzgerald wrote in Crack-Up (Wilson, CU), that posthumous collection full of his sinewy, mature, self-reliant thought, is ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at same time and still retain ability to function (CU 69). By function, Fitzgerald means more than cope; he's affirming that readiness to act in world with something approaching one's full powers--a willingness of heart combined with enabling critical intelligence. …