Tender is the Night

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in a copy of a friend's book "Tender Night": "If you loved the great Gatsby, for God's sake, read this. Set in the south of France in the decade after World War I, the film is the story of a brilliant and magnetic psychiatrist named Dick Diver; charming, rich and dangerously unstable mentally ill Nicole becomes his wife; and the beautiful, sad ten-year-old pas-de-de-de-de-they play along the border between common sense and madness. In "Tender Night," Fitzgerald deliberately set about writing the largest and most far-reaching novel of his career, radically experimenting with the narrative traditions of chronology and perspective, and drawing on early breakthroughs in psychiatry to enrich his explanation of the composition and fragmentation of character and culture. It is also the most intense, even painful, autobiography of Fitzgerald's novels; it burns with a dark, bitter vitality because it's absolutely true. F. Scott Fitzgerald literally put his soul into "Tender Night", and after the novel's initial publication in its first publication, the lack of commercial success broke him. Six years later, he would die without publishing another novel and not knowing that "Tender Night" would be considered perhaps the sharpest masterpiece of its author. According to Mabel Dodge Luhan, this elevated her to the heights of "modern Orpheus".

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