Tender is the Night Fitzgerald Francis Scott (2024)

Set in the South of France during the decade after World War I, Tender Is the Night follows Dick Diver, a brilliant and magnetic psychiatrist; Nicole, his wealthy, captivating, and dangerously unstable patient who becomes his wife; and the harrowing ten-year pas de deux they perform along the border between sanity and madness. F. Scott Fitzgeralds most ambitious novel experiments with chronology and point of view, drawing on early advances in psychiatry to explore the formation and breakdown of individuals and cultures. Intensely autobiographical, it portrays a caring mans disintegration under the strain of his wifes illness and a lifestyle that erodes his moral values, while Dicks descent into alcoholism eerily anticipates Fitzgeralds own fate. Initially unsuccessful when published in 1934, the novel later came to be regarded as perhaps its authors most poignant masterpiece.