Tender is the Night
Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald’s great final novel.
First edition of the work which Fitzgerald considered to be his finest.
A beautiful copy, kept in its 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. 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.
“Everything hinged on Tender is the Night... he was nervous about it on several counts. The man who had begun it in 1925, who had fashioned the beautiful barbarism of its opening sequences, wasn’t the same man who completed it in 1933; in between, Zelda”s breakdown, the crumbling of American prosperity, and other reverses had changed and darkened his sensibility” (Turnbull, pp. 241-46).
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.
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 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.
A beautiful copy, preserved in its original green cloth, as issued.
Provenance : Lois & Landon Raymond, avec ex-libris.
