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F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Tender is the Night: A Novel Reissue Edition, Kindle Edition

by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 2,392 ratings
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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.
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 in 1934 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 perhaps its author's most poignant masterpiece. In Mabel Dodge Luhan's words, it raised him to the heights of "a modern Orpheus."
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  1. ISBN-13
    978-0684801544
  2. Edition
    Reissue
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publisher
    Scribner
  5. Publication date
    May 27, 2003
  6. Language
    English
  7. File size
    5099 KB
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"It's amazing how excellent much of it is."
—Ernest Hemingway

"I will say now, Tender Is the Night is in the early stages of being my favorite book, even more than This Side of Paradise."
—John O'Hara

About the Author

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896. He attended Princeton University, joined the United States Army during World War I, and published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920. That same year he married Zelda Sayre and for the next decade the couple lived in New York, Paris, and on the Riviera. Fitzgerald’s masterpieces include The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night. He died at the age of forty-four while working on The Last Tycoon. Fitzgerald’s fiction has secured his reputation as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B000FC0VBQ
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Scribner; Reissue edition (May 27, 2003)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 27, 2003
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 5099 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 2,392 ratings

About the author

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F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in St Paul, Minnesota, and went to Princeton University which he left in 1917 to join the army. Fitzgerald was said to have epitomised the Jazz Age, an age inhabited by a generation he defined as 'grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken'.

In 1920 he married Zelda Sayre. Their destructive relationship and her subsequent mental breakdowns became a major influence on his writing. Among his publications were five novels, This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby, The Beautiful and Damned, Tender is the Night and The Love of the Last Tycoon (his last and unfinished work): six volumes of short stories and The Crack-Up, a selection of autobiographical pieces.

Fitzgerald died suddenly in 1940. After his death The New York Times said of him that 'He was better than he knew, for in fact and in the literary sense he invented a "generation" ... he might have interpreted them and even guided them, as in their middle years they saw a different and nobler freedom threatened with destruction.'

Customer reviews

4.1 out of 5 stars
4.1 out of 5
2,392 global ratings
Not the same book as advertised
1 Star
Not the same book as advertised
Not the same book as advertised at all!! Surprised and disappointed to say the least. It’s defiantly used and a small stain on the cover, an old sticker on the spine.
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Top reviews from the United States

Philip L. Tudor
5.0 out of 5 stars Putting together fragments of the lives of those he knows, and himself, plus more, F. Scott Fitzgerald creates a masterpiece.
Reviewed in the United States on October 15, 2014
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Tender is the Night was very interesting to me because I read it long after I read a biography of the writer. The book was written after Fitzgerald had been on a long dry spell and desperately needed money both to keep up his lifestyle and primarily to pay for incredibly expensive ongoing mental health hospitalization for his wife Zelda in Switzerland and the US. Fitzgerald takes a mix and match of his own life and those of others he met during the hey-day of American writers in Paris and Europe in the 1920's. Primarily, he uses a rich couple who coddled geniuses, Sarah and Gerald Murphy, as part models for the main couple of his book, Dick and Nicole Diver. While both of the Murphys were rich and started inviting the highly talented to their home by an initially almost private beach, Fitzgerald places the Divers in a close match to the Murphy's home on the French Riviera, has Dick raking the sand like Gerald Murphy did to make it habitable for sunbathing, and initially shows them as taste makers for the Lost Generation. However, Fitzgerald invents many parts of the Divers, such as one party to the relationship only being wealthy, while the other is a psychiatrist, and has the Divers travelling in a style much like the Fitzgeralds did, as they moved from one expensive hotel and rented apartment or home to another.

Due to Fitzgerald's own wife's quite serious mental illness, which to me made her as well as Nicole Diver, upon whom her madness is modelled, quite egocentric. Fitzgerald clearly shows the burden of being married to a seriously ill person before medication entered the picture in psychiatry. Everything revolves around the mentally ill person's feelings and weaknesses, with the sane spouse having to always be the strong one with no one to turn to for his own insecurities, such as we all have. The book shows how Dick struggles with this, and how it eventually destroys him. In essence, while the wife is expected to have the destroyed life, much like Zelda Fitzgerald had; in this case the wife comes out on top and essentially betrays the man who has protected her for so many years and brought her to full sanity.

Fitzgerald was extremely devoted to his wife, and devoted to her care (especially making sure it was paid for). as he drank himself into a more or less constant stupor as a process. I think this book was an outlet for him to tell what that felt like, as Zelda was talentless bur relentlessly jealous of her husband's talents. In fact, Zelda seemed to me to be much more dislikable than Nicole Diver in the book.

The book, which has been hashed over for decades as a major classic, is still well worth reading. Fitzgerald's writing is downright lyrical in its beauty and the narration keeps you turning the pages, even though the book is in no way a thriller or mystery. I did not feel gulty giving a few spoilers in this review because I am probably the only serious reader who really did not know the plot of the book before I read it. It deserves its status as a worldwide classic, and is one of the best written books I have ever read.
12 people found this helpful
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opal
4.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful but uneven
Reviewed in the United States on March 14, 2024
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Highly evocative of its time, people and places with some ravishing descriptive prose and sensitive character insights. On the negative side, a slightly unsatisfying structure with flashbacks, leaps in time and changing points-of-view. Elaborate use of metaphors occasionally becomes a distraction. Be prepared for the author’s uncritical treatment of racism, sexism, homophobia and class-bound prejudices.
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Peter John
5.0 out of 5 stars Heart wrenching
Reviewed in the United States on October 8, 2022
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This is the first F Scott Fitzgerald novel I’ve read. I possibly have read the Great Gatsby, many many years ago.It is romantic sad tugs at the heart and very eloquently written. I enjoyed his style more than Hemingway’s, not to say that I do not enjoy Hemingway’s writings. My French is very rusty and I wish the editors would have provided some translations. FSF’s writing is a far cry from most of the current novelists that I read and in reality I thoroughly enjoyed his deft use of the English language truly a thinking person’s novel. I will next read his first novel asap
2 people found this helpful
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J. Edgar Mihelic, MA, MA, MBA
3.0 out of 5 stars Why is Fitzgerald so attracted to such loathsome characters?
Reviewed in the United States on June 15, 2010
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Now, I have an admission to make. In my own fiction, I tend to get lost in my own little world, fall in love with my language and my parataxis, and subject my reader to little in-jokes that make me laugh. For example, in a recent work of mine, I included a little part about T. S. Eliot's Wasteland. I referenced, what I though to be heavy handedly, the "game of chess" section, and what I hoped to be more oblique, the "death by water" part. This was done because I was trying to get across the theme of decay. Ok, so it did not work. I can accept that fact. Maybe I have to be more aware of the audience, or something along those lines. The point here is that my own idiosyncrasies perhaps do not translate well. I have the same problem reading Fitzgerald that I suppose that people have when reading my own work.

Alcoholics living out their own malaise in high society do not interest me. I cannot find the characters that Fitzgerald writes about compelling. I find myself disgusted at their self-indulgent and harmful acts. The knowledge that these characters come from real life in the circles that Fitzgerald lived in pushes me over the edge. He obviously had interest in these sorts of people. It cannot be denied that he the prime chronicler of the Jazz Age. Dick, Nicole and their lot are loathsome characters. I first read this book, two years or so ago, and I have to say that I have no desire to revisit it. There are other more pressing things on the schedule, like washing my hair.

Fitzgerald got closer to a sympathetic character when he fleshed out Nick in The Great Gatsby. I think this is because he was portraying someone more like himself. Nick was more of an outsider looking in, or in his case, at the other end of the egg. Fitzgerald is able to create someone who you can sympathize with, because Nick somehow comes across as the most human of the characters that I can remember. Nick possesses a certain sense of longing to belong that seems to be indicative of Fitzgerald himself. He appears as an outsider in this expatriate community, or even the riche community of Gatsby.

The question I have is, "Why is Fitzgerald so attracted to such loathsome characters?" He to seems entranced by broken people in circumstances that would seem to be the embodiment of success on some levels. These characters all have a façade that seems smooth and glassy, only you can see the imperfections the closer you get. Dick, Nicole, Rosemary, Abe, Jay, and Nick all have their failings in the realm of fiction. Fitzgerald has his own, and so does Zelda.

I have no answers for my own question, and as a reader, I cannot get past this isolation that Fitzgerald uses by focusing on such unsympathetic characters. His writings have long been canonized, and are taught all over, but I have a distance with him that is greater than the one I feel when reading Hemingway.
8 people found this helpful
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Ted d'Afflisio
5.0 out of 5 stars Tender is the Night
Reviewed in the United States on November 2, 2019
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From the title through to the conclusion this book is a masterpiece, which I’ve read several times, each time drawing something different from it. It is a well of rich, lyrical writing, a romance, a tragedy. It is life, it’s lessons hard learned, that Fitzgerald gives to us from his own tortures. If you’ve ever loved, given yourself completely to a person and seen that pass away from you as you always knew in some part of you that it would, you should read this book. That it’s setting is the Riviera gives wing to Fitzgerald’s gift for description, the tone, the texture. You can feel the warmth of the water, the sand, the sky the winds that sweep across the pines and yet always this stands as a counterpoint to the human beings, their loves, their tragedies.
19 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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Mar Santamaría
5.0 out of 5 stars LOVE IT
Reviewed in Mexico on November 7, 2022
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I love it, it is a great edition!!
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Mar Santamaría
5.0 out of 5 stars LOVE IT
Reviewed in Mexico on November 7, 2022
I love it, it is a great edition!!
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Gato 520
5.0 out of 5 stars A brilliant masterpiece
Reviewed in Canada on June 28, 2020
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Though GREAT GATSBY is, indeed, "great".... far deeper, more nuanced & more heart-breakingly profound is the brilliant masterwork TENDER IS THE NIGHT. One of the masterpieces for the ages.....
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Pascual Fernández
4.0 out of 5 stars Encolada
Reviewed in Spain on May 13, 2021
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Bonita edición de un gran clásico. Lo compré frente a otras ediciones pagando algo más por la editorial (penguin) y porque la encuadernación parecía buena pensando que la recibiría en cuadernillas en lugar de encolada (cosa que odio, porque al cabo del uso las hojas acaban sueltas) lamentablemente a pesar de ser una encuadernación muy hermosa es encolada. Habría preferido una edición de bolsillo en cuadernillas. Por lo demás....es Fitzgerald.
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Amazon Kunde
5.0 out of 5 stars Tender is the night
Reviewed in Germany on February 26, 2021
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War ein Geschenk. Ist gut angekommen.
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aracla
5.0 out of 5 stars Scribner always
Reviewed in Italy on November 5, 2020
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Another masterpiece by Fitzgerald. I give you one reason to read it, this quote "I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there'll always be the person I am to-night." - as for the book itself, I suggest you to buy the Scribner edition always, as it was Fitzgerald's editor and it is the most genuine you can trust. This particular one is a beat cheap in terms of paper quality, I mean it's too thin, but I knew that as I bought the cheap version. As for the rest, all good. Ok size of the letters .
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aracla
5.0 out of 5 stars Scribner always
Reviewed in Italy on November 5, 2020
Another masterpiece by Fitzgerald. I give you one reason to read it, this quote "I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there'll always be the person I am to-night." - as for the book itself, I suggest you to buy the Scribner edition always, as it was Fitzgerald's editor and it is the most genuine you can trust. This particular one is a beat cheap in terms of paper quality, I mean it's too thin, but I knew that as I bought the cheap version. As for the rest, all good. Ok size of the letters .
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