Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald - June 1977

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, June 1977 [c1934]. Hardcover. Quarter-bound in black cloth with black paper sides and gilt lettering to spine. An As New book in a Fine jacket. Slight rubbing to jacket, otherwise pristine inside and out. Very tight. Not from a library. No remainder mark. Not clipped. 315 pages.

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. In Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald deliberately set out to write the most ambitious and far-reaching novel of his career, experimenting radically with narrative conventions of chronology and point of view and drawing on early breakthroughs in psychiatry to enrich his account of the makeup and breakdown of character and culture. 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. This account of a caring man who disintegrates under the twin strains of his wife's derangement and a lifestyle that gnaws away at his sense of moral values offers an authorial cri de coeur, while Dick Diver's downward spiral into alcoholic dissolution is an eerie portent of Fitzgerald's own fate. F. Scott Fitzgerald literally put his soul into Tender Is the Night, and the novel's lack of commercial success upon its initial publication shattered him. He would die six years later without having published another novel, and without knowing that Tender Is the Night would come to be seen as its author's masterpiece.