The first publication in which The Last Word appeared was Ted Saucier’s classic 1951 cocktail book ‘Bottoms Up!’. In it Saucier states that the cocktail was first served around 30 years earlier in the Detroit Athletic Club and attributes its creation to Frank Fogarty, who later introduced it to New York as well.
Curiously, despite huge popularity in the first half of the twentieth century the cocktail fell into oblivion after World War II. Only in 2004 was the cocktail rediscovered and resurrected into mainstream mixology again by Seattle bartender Murray Stenson.