Tender is the Night
Fitzgerald’s great final novel.
First edition in publisher’s green cloth.
In-8 de (4) ff., 408 pp.
Toile verte d’éditeur, titre et nom de l’auteur dorés au dos, petite tache claire sur le plat supérieur, cachet de bibliothèque « The League House ». Reliure de l’époque.
186 x 132 mm.
Fitzgerald, Francis Scott. Tender is the Night.
New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934.
Édition originale et premier tirage du dernier chef-d’œuvre de Fitzgerald.
First edition first printing of Fitzgerald’s last masterpiece, with the Scribner seal & the letter "A".
Bruccoli, A15.1.a.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to one of his friends about Tender is the Night, “If you liked The Great Gatsby, for Go’'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.
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 his masterpiece. In Mabel Dodge Luhan’s words, it raised him to the heights of “a modern Orpheus”.
Tender is the Night was named by Modern Library as one of the 100 greatest novels of the twentieth century.
Ce roman, que la critique accueillit avec des réactions fort diverses, peut être considéré à certains égards comme une transposition émouvante de la propre destinée de l’auteur.
Copy preserved in its original publisher green cloth, as issued.
Provenance: Library stamp “The League House”.
