F. Scott Fitzgerald. First edition, later printing. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1951. Both unclipped dust jacket, in a mylar protective wrapper, and hardcover are in Near Fine condition. No writing or markings found in the book, 356 pp. Preface written by Malcolm Crowley.
This is the final, corrected version, of Fitzgerald's classic novel. It took more than nine years to write. Tender is the Night was first published in 1934. The author's fourth and final novel. The plot mirrors the Fitzgeralds' own struggles with alcohol and mental illness, which snowballed as Fitzgerald worked on this, his last completed novel. It was serialized by Scribner's Magazine between January and April 1934. The first version, written in the early 1930's relies on a flashback narration. Cowley's rewrite is chronological.
"Tender is the Night gets better and better" ~ Ernest Hemingway
"F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in a friend's copy of Tender Is the Night, "If you liked The Great Gatsby, for God's sake read this. Gatsby was a tour de force but this is a confession of faith." Set in the South of France in the decade after World War I, Tender Is the Night, is the story of a brilliant and magnetic psychiatrist named Dick Diver; the bewitching, wealthy, and dangerously unstable mental patient, Nicole, who becomes his wife; and the beautiful, harrowing ten-year pas de deux they act out along the border between sanity and madness. Tender Is the Night is also the most intensely, even painfully, autobiographical of Fitzgerald's novels; it smolders with a dark, bitter vitality because it is so utterly true."
A must have for the library of any Fitzgerald fan or collector. This edition is a true gem.
