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- Herausgeber: DigiCat
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Francis Scott Fitzgerald's "Tender Is the Night" is a profound exploration of love, ambition, and the disintegration of the American Dream in the 1920s. The narrative unfolds through the life of Dick Diver, a charismatic psychiatrist, and his tumultuous relationship with the fragile actress Nicole Warren, highlighting themes of mental illness, identity, and the moral decay of the expatriate community in Europe. Fitzgerald's lyrical prose, steeped in symbolism and rich imagery, captures both the allure and the malaise of a post-war society, evoking a poignant commentary on the era's decadence and despair. Fitzgerald, a leading figure of the Jazz Age, penned this novel during a tumultuous period in his own life, marked by personal struggles and societal changes. His firsthand experiences with the complexities of wealth and mental health, coupled with his observations of expatriate life in Europe, deeply informed his artistic vision, culminating in the narrative's sophisticated structure and emotional depth. "Tender Is the Night" reflects not only Fitzgerald's personal tribulations but also a broader cultural commentary reflective of its time. This masterpiece is highly recommended for readers seeking a richly layered and evocative literary experience. Fitzgerald's exploration of the human psyche and social disillusionment resonates deeply, making it an essential reading for anyone interested in the complexities of love and identity against the backdrop of societal expectations. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Tender Is the Night
Table of Contents
Introduction
Beauty glitters until the light changes, and then the same sheen begins to show its cracks. Tender Is the Night turns this transformation into a living drama, tracing how charm, wealth, and professional brilliance can refract into vulnerability. Rather than condemning or celebrating its characters, the novel lingers in the uneasy spaces where affection becomes influence and pleasure shades into peril. On sunstruck terraces and in dim hotel salons, it asks how people maintain poise while tides shift beneath them. The result is a work that makes glamour not a destination but a pressure test for character, ethics, and love.
Written by Francis Scott Fitzgerald and first published in 1934, Tender Is the Night unfolds largely across the French Riviera and other European settings. The story begins when a young American film actress, Rosemary Hoyt, is drawn into the orbit of a dazzling American couple, Dick and Nicole Diver. Their circle of expatriate friends embodies abundance and poise, yet the atmosphere is edged with restlessness. Fitzgerald presents an alluring surface and then guides readers toward the currents underneath. Without revealing later turns, it is enough to say the novel examines how intimacy, ambition, and responsibility collide in the sunlit world of interwar leisure.
The book holds classic status because it joins elegant style to psychological rigor, expanding the reach of the modern American novel. Fitzgerald, widely recognized for The Great Gatsby, aimed here at a broader canvas: a meditation on marriage, vocation, and the social theater of privilege. Its enduring themes—frailty within strength, the costs of charisma, the precarious balance between care and control—continue to resonate. The prose is finely wrought yet unsentimental, building scenes that shimmer while advancing moral inquiry. Its influence can be felt across later fiction that probes the allure and corrosion of wealth and the uneasy intimacy of power.
Fitzgerald composed the novel over several demanding years in the late 1920s and early 1930s, a period shadowed by economic upheaval and personal strain. Publishing it in 1934 placed the book at a hinge of history, when the exuberance of the previous decade had given way to uncertainty. That backdrop informs its expatriate milieu: seaside hotels, rented villas, salons where Americans and Europeans test new identities far from home. The novel engages the interwar atmosphere without turning into a historical pageant. It concentrates on private negotiations—between lovers, friends, and colleagues—while the larger world drifts in, palpable and inescapable.
Formally, Tender Is the Night is notable for its shifting centers of attention and the subtle recalibration of sympathy. Fitzgerald guides readers through changes in vantage, allowing scenes to refract through different consciousnesses. Time is handled with tactful ellipses and recollection, creating a mosaic rather than a single uninterrupted line. This structure supports the book’s psychological ambitions: the reader experiences not only events but the tremors of perception that accompany them. The style remains musical without excess, attentive to gesture and atmosphere. Across parties, clinics, beaches, and trains, the prose keeps returning to the enigma of motive.
At its core, the novel investigates how love can blur with stewardship, how generosity can carry the seed of domination, and how social grace can conceal fatigue. Fitzgerald is alert to the ways money lubricates and distorts relationships, smoothing crisis for a time while deferring real reckoning. The American dream, transplanted to Europe, becomes a question of poise and endurance rather than conquest. Public poise collides with private reckoning; the obligations of vocation press against the claims of intimacy. The book’s insight lies in refusing consolation: it tracks the minute compromises by which bright days turn complicated.
The central figures are introduced with exceptional care. Dick Diver is a gifted American psychiatrist whose intelligence and charm steadies a glamorous social world. Nicole Diver, his wife, embodies radiance and mystery, her presence both anchoring and enigmatic. Into their circle comes Rosemary, young and impressionable, whose career and star power add a modern, cinematic gloss to the scene. Around them move friends, clients, and acquaintances, people adept at conversation and performance. The novel’s power arises from their interactions—moments of kindness, jealousy, tact, and misstep—through which character is revealed more by gesture than by declaration.
The setting contributes more than scenery; it acts as an instrument that amplifies sensation. Riviera light sharpens colors and moods, while the regimented ease of resorts prescribes rituals of breakfast, bathing, gossip, and cocktails. Trains and steamers create a rhythm of departure and return, suggesting how mobility promises renewal yet repeats old patterns. The presence of medicine, clinics, and doctors intersects with social life, showing how professional authority and private need intertwine. By weaving these elements, Fitzgerald makes place a pressure on the self: a beautiful zone where appearance is nearly a moral demand.
On publication, Tender Is the Night did not receive the unanimous acclaim that later attached to it, yet its stature has grown steadily. Readers and critics recognized in its pages an unusually sensitive portrait of privilege under stress and of intellect tested by emotion. Its aesthetic—lyrical yet cool-eyed—helped shape subsequent explorations of expatriate glamour and psychological complexity. Many later writers have echoed its interest in fractured charisma, porous boundaries between caregiving and control, and the moral ambiguities of success. The novel’s ongoing presence in classrooms and criticism attests to its formal daring and ethical bite.
Part of the work’s magnetism lies in its refusal to caricature. Fitzgerald grants each principal character coherence and contradiction, allowing virtues to abut weaknesses without neat resolution. The social scenes breathe with tact, misreading, coded kindness, and calculated silence. The novel’s symbols—the sea’s brightness, the hush of gardens, the theater of parties—accumulate meaning without overstatement. Because the book resists verdicts, readers are invited into an active role: weighing motives, sensing what remains unspoken, and considering how circumstance erodes or fortifies resolve. That invitation, sustained by exact prose, is a mark of enduring art.
Read today, the novel speaks to conversations about mental health, the ethics of care, and the magnetism of celebrity. It observes how institutions and personal relationships intersect, how work shapes identity, and how global mobility intensifies both freedom and dislocation. The book’s social world may seem distant, but its patterns—curated images, curated intimacy, curated success—feel familiar. Fitzgerald neither glamorizes nor scolds; he shows a system of pressures that makes certain choices likely and others costly. Such clarity keeps the book from aging into mere period charm, granting it ongoing interpretive life.
Tender Is the Night endures because it captures the beauty and burden of living in public, of being talented, loved, and exposed. Its scenes of sunlit leisure are inseparable from questions of duty and self-respect. Across changing literary fashions, the novel remains a touchstone for writers and readers seeking a language for fracture—how bright surfaces can protect, deceive, or finally illuminate. By connecting intimate drama to larger social currents, Fitzgerald created a classic that invites rereading. It offers not only an exquisite portrait of a time and set, but also a lasting meditation on what attention, care, and desire cost.
Synopsis
Tender Is the Night, a 1934 novel by Francis Scott Fitzgerald, unfolds among American and European expatriates who drift through beaches, villas, and fashionable capitals between the wars. At its heart is the glamorous couple Dick and Nicole Diver, whose charm attracts a floating circle of friends and admirers. The story begins on the French Riviera, where a young American film star, Rosemary Hoyt, arrives for a summer that promises leisure and possibility. Drawn to the Divers’ elegance and seeming harmony, she joins their orbit, sensing both an ideal to emulate and a mystery she cannot name. Outward radiance conceals private pressures.
Rosemary’s perspective frames the early chapters, emphasizing the seduction of surfaces: afternoon swims, languid lunches, and intimate conversations that create the illusion of familial closeness. Dick’s wit and authority appear effortless, while Nicole’s beauty and generosity anchor the group. Yet minor disruptions—hesitations, glances, and lapses in composure—suggest that the pair’s serenity depends on careful choreography. Rosemary is both guest and observer, learning the unwritten rules of a rarefied world where discretion is currency. Her admiration shades into infatuation, and the Divers’ hospitality accommodates her presence without fully admitting her to their inner life, a tension that sets the novel’s emotional stakes.
As the summer ripens, Fitzgerald shows how conviviality can mask strain. Parties and excursions move the narrative along, but their sparkle is edged with unease. Rosemary witnesses moments that complicate her idealized view: flashes of impatience, whispers about money, and hints that Nicole’s composure can falter. Dick, meanwhile, manages conflicts before they disturb the surface, acting as host, physician, and impresario of harmony. The atmosphere remains intoxicating, yet the tone darkens almost imperceptibly, as if the season itself were overripe. Temptation coexists with duty; affection with ambition. The first cracks in the Divers’ image appear, not as scandal, but as fatigue.
When the circle moves from seaside ritual to city life, the rhythms quicken and fragment. In Paris and other urban settings, the characters confront demands that leisure once diffused: professional obligations, artistic ambitions, financial choices, and the scrutiny of strangers. Rosemary’s career commitments tug at her loyalties, while Dick negotiates roles that increasingly conflict—doctor, companion, husband, confidant. Moments of exhilaration give way to awkward encounters, and carefully maintained boundaries blur. The novel treats these shifts not as melodrama but as accumulations of stress. What once looked like a perfect stage set for pleasure becomes a network of obligations whose weight is growing.
Midway, the narrative turns back to recount the making of the Divers’ marriage. Dick emerges as a gifted young psychiatrist whose methodological confidence intersects with American optimism and postwar disillusionment. He meets Nicole under professional circumstances that throw ethics and affection into unstable alignment, and her wealthy family’s involvement further complicates boundaries. A marriage follows, and with it a vision of therapeutic stability sustained by privilege. In Switzerland, Dick helps establish a clinic, imagining a life where science, compassion, and domesticity reinforce one another. The retrospective clarifies both the intensity of their bond and the compromises smoothed over by money and charm.
From this foundation, Fitzgerald traces the price of a life organized around caregiving and grace. Dick becomes the social axis of a cosmopolitan set, dispensing amusement, advice, and discretion. He also shoulders responsibilities that blur with dependence, as wealth cushions risk yet tightens expectations. Professional promise contends with hospitality, and the role of healer shades into that of entertainer. The couple’s household acquires rituals of control that keep crisis at bay but limit spontaneity. The clinic and the villa seem to secure order, yet each demands energy that drains the other. Underneath accomplishment, unspent grief and deferred ambition quietly accumulate.
Returning to the present, the book follows renewed journeys across the Continent, where small embarrassments begin to carry larger meanings. Dick’s drinking, once a social lubricant, edges toward liability, and his tact occasionally fails in public moments that sting. Rosemary, still connected to the Divers, becomes both catalyst and mirror, her youth highlighting what time has altered. Legal and social frictions—misread gestures, provincial rules, the authority of local officials—test the poise that once defined the group. The couple’s marriage, long protected by routine, shows its vulnerabilities, and the friends who clustered around them start to drift, sensing the costs of intimacy.
Nicole’s position grows more complicated as she balances loyalty, health, and a desire for self-determination. Her family’s counsel, the presence of children, and the memory of treatment all shape choices that cannot be simple. Power within the marriage fluctuates: dependence gives way to assertion, while protection can resemble confinement. Fitzgerald presents these changes without caricature, emphasizing practical questions—who decides, who pays, who yields—beneath romantic ideals. The social world that once seemed effortlessly curated proves contingent on labor that is no longer invisible. The novel’s conflicts crystallize around care, autonomy, and the extent to which love can survive unequal arrangements.
Without disclosing later turns, the closing movement reflects on glamour’s fragility and the moral costs of living as a work of art. Tender Is the Night portrays the interwar expatriate milieu as both sanctuary and trap, where money enables beauty but also fixes roles. It asks how professional ethics endure intimacy, how charisma can become a burden, and how illness shapes, but need not define, a life. Fitzgerald’s broader message is elegiac rather than verdict-driven: radiance fades, yet the effort to orchestrate happiness reveals the era’s aspirations and limits. The novel endures as a nuanced study of love, power, and time.
Historical Context
Tender Is the Night unfolds in the interwar years, largely along the French Riviera and in other European locales frequented by well-to-do American expatriates. The setting is framed by newly dominant leisure institutions—grand hotels, seaside resorts, casinos, and private villas—alongside the rising prestige of modern medicine, especially psychiatry and Swiss clinics catering to international patients. Postwar Europe’s political stability was tentative, regulated through the League of Nations and dependent on fragile economies. Within this landscape, American money, passports, and mobility grant characters unusual latitude, while the social codes of the transatlantic elite—etiquette at beaches, salons, and soirées—structure the rhythms of daily life that the novel scrutinizes.
The novel’s world is marked by the aftershocks of the First World War (1914–1918). Europe emerged physically devastated and psychologically exhausted, with many veterans and civilians carrying wounds and trauma. The United States, comparatively unscathed on its own soil, entered the 1920s with growing economic and cultural influence. This imbalance drew Americans to the Continent for pleasure, art, and reinvention. A pervasive mood of disillusionment—the so-called Lost Generation—filtered into literature and life. Tender Is the Night reflects this milieu: prosperous Americans wander a Europe still reckoning with war’s costs, testing new freedoms yet haunted by a sense that older certainties and hierarchies have collapsed.
Expatriate communities flourished in Paris, the Riviera, and Swiss resort towns during the 1920s. Americans and other foreigners gathered in cafés, studios, and salons where artistic experimentation mixed with conspicuous leisure. Paris offered permissive social spaces, relatively affordable living for dollar-rich travelers, and thriving networks of publishers and galleries. The Riviera extended that atmosphere into a seasonal playground of beaches, tennis courts, and yacht clubs. Luxury trains—especially the Train Bleu after 1922—sped travelers overnight from Paris to the coast, making weekend migrations possible. This cosmopolitan infrastructure underwrites the novel’s itinerant scenes, where social groups coalesce, disperse, and re-form in settings designed for display.
The Côte d’Azur’s leisure economy expanded rapidly after the war. Long a winter refuge for European aristocracy, it became a summer destination in the mid-1920s, helped by American expatriates who popularized bathing, boating, and open-air fêtes at places like Cap d’Antibes and Cannes. Upscale hotels and private villas grew around this clientele; service labor, seasonal work, and hospitality industries followed. Casino culture in Monaco and fashionable regattas added spectacle and risk. Fitzgerald knew this world firsthand and situates his characters within its rituals of daytime sport and nighttime festivity. The Riviera’s glitter offers both glamour and scrutiny, a stage where reputations, alliances, and finances are always on display.
American Prohibition (1920–1933) forms an important backdrop. The constitutional ban on the manufacture and sale of alcohol in the United States encouraged clandestine drinking at home and unfettered consumption abroad. For Americans in Europe, the ready availability of legal alcohol, coupled with late-night entertainment and café culture, fostered convivial excess. The social lubricants of champagne, cocktails, and seaside bars suffuse the novel’s parties and quarrels. Fitzgerald’s portrayal engages a larger historical contrast: the regimented moral order of Prohibition America versus the permissive cosmopolitanism of European resorts. This tension helps explain the hedonism, bravado, and self-destruction that shadow interwar transatlantic social life.
Technological advances in transport and communication made such mobility routine for the wealthy. Ocean liners connected New York with Cherbourg or Southampton in under a week. After World War I, passports became standard, but affluent travelers navigated documentation with ease. The Train Bleu linked Paris to Nice in comfort, while expanding road networks and reliable automobiles turned the Corniche roads into scenic drives. Telephones and telegraphs sustained long-distance coordination of parties, finances, and professional obligations. These systems structure the novel’s constant motion: characters shuttle across borders with the confidence of a class that has made modern speed and convenience an extension of its social capital.
Currency dynamics amplified American purchasing power. In the mid-1920s the U.S. dollar was strong, while the French franc suffered significant postwar inflation before being stabilized under Raymond Poincaré in 1926. For dollar-bearing tourists, rents, servants, and luxury goods felt comparatively inexpensive. This favorable exchange encouraged Americans to rent villas, hire staff, and extend holidays. Conversely, the economy of service workers and local businesses became tethered to seasonal foreign spending. The novel quietly registers these realities: behind the polished surface of leisure lies a matrix of exchange rates, tips, and retainers that make the Riviera’s effortless ease possible—and precarious.
The 1920s boom, driven by consumer credit, mass production, and rising markets, ended abruptly with the 1929 Wall Street Crash. The Great Depression, deepening through the early 1930s, forced reassessments of wealth, status, and personal prospects. Fitzgerald conceived and revised Tender Is the Night across this hinge, and it appeared in 1934, when American unemployment remained high and optimism was hard-won. The book’s tone—alternating brilliance with fatigue—echoes this historical shift. The exuberant mid-decade parties and confident spending give way to an awareness of liabilities, reputations, and dwindling resources, mirroring a wider cultural movement from celebration to reckoning.
Psychiatry and psychoanalysis were ascendant in the interwar period. Sigmund Freud’s theories had spread internationally, and Carl Jung’s analytical psychology was influential, especially in Switzerland. Wealthy patients from across Europe and the United States sought treatment at Swiss clinics that combined talk therapy, rest cures, and a regimented routine in tranquil settings. Institutions such as Burghölzli in Zurich and private clinics near Lake Geneva became synonymous with cutting-edge care. The novel’s central presence of psychiatrists and patients reflects this trend, engaging questions of therapeutic authority, professional ethics, and the porous boundaries between treatment and social intimacy in élite circles.
Gender norms were in flux. American women gained the vote in 1920, and the public figure of the flapper signaled changing attitudes toward fashion, sexuality, and independence. Yet legal and economic structures often preserved male control, especially over family wealth and medical decisions. Among upper classes, trusts and guardianship arrangements were common ways to manage inheritances. In cross-border marriages, jurisdictional differences in family and property law complicated agency further. Tender Is the Night explores these tensions: it shows modern women negotiating new freedoms within persistent hierarchies, and depicts how medical expertise and money could combine to stabilize—or destabilize—marital power.
Heredity loomed large in interwar medical thinking. Eugenics, regrettably mainstream in the United States and parts of Europe from the 1910s through the 1930s, framed mental illness and social problems as inheritable traits. By the early 1930s, more than two dozen U.S. states had sterilization statutes targeting those labeled unfit. While the novel does not center such policies, it inhabits a world where psychiatrists, families, and courts often interpreted distress through hereditarian lenses. This context illuminates the period’s anxieties about lineage, respectability, and the risks of mixing romance with clinical judgment—anxieties that inform the novel’s atmosphere and conflicts.
The status of the American medical profession was being consolidated as a prestigious, scientifically credentialed field. The Flexner Report of 1910 had spurred reforms in medical education, elevating research standards and clinical training. Psychiatrists, in particular, occupied an ambiguous position: part physician, part confidant, often moving in the same social circles as their patients. Many sought advanced study in Vienna, Zurich, or Berlin, then practiced in private settings serving affluent clientele. Tender Is the Night scrutinizes the social authority this conferred—how the aura of expertise could command deference, invite temptation, and entangle doctors in obligations that exceeded the clinic’s walls.
The arts and letters of the period were likewise in revolt against old forms. Modernist experimentation flourished in Paris, where expatriates encountered Dada, Surrealism, and avant-garde theater. Jazz captivated European audiences; figures like Josephine Baker symbolized a modern, cosmopolitan nightlife starting in the mid-1920s. Wealthy patrons supported artists and designers, collecting paintings and hosting gatherings that blurred art, fashion, and society. Fitzgerald positions his characters in this crosscurrent of refinement and novelty, where cultivated taste becomes an identity project. The novel mirrors the period’s glamour while exposing its fragility, noting how taste can mask, but not resolve, deeper personal and social fissures.
Mass media accelerated these cultural shifts. By the late 1920s, radio ownership and cinema attendance were widespread in the United States, and talking pictures transformed entertainment after 1927. Slick magazines promoted lifestyles through advertising, fiction, and celebrity profiles. Fitzgerald himself depended on high-paying magazine stories to finance travel and debts while laboring over his novel. This ecosystem circulated ideals of beauty, youth, and ease, turning private leisure into public aspiration. Tender Is the Night registers the feedback loop between spectacle and selfhood: characters perform for an imagined audience, conscious that newspapers, gossip, and photographs can transform a holiday moment into a lasting reputation.
Laws and customs governing sex, marriage, and divorce were evolving unevenly. Divorce rates rose in the United States during the 1920s, yet stigma lingered, especially in upper-class circles that prized family continuity. European jurisdictions offered different grounds and procedures, tempting some to seek divorces abroad. These disparities created a legal maze around property, custody, and social standing. Against this background, the novel presents marriages under pressure from money, illness, and desire. It acknowledges that personal choices were never purely private in this milieu; they were negotiated through lawyers, trustees, and a watchful society that made intimate change a public matter.
Fitzgerald’s biography intersects closely with the book’s geography. He and Zelda Fitzgerald lived in France from 1924 to 1926, dividing time between Paris and the Riviera, where they socialized with artists and wealthy expatriates. He returned to Europe multiple times and worked on the novel for much of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Zelda’s mental health crises, including treatment in Switzerland at a clinic in Prangins around 1930–1931 under Dr. Oscar Forel, acquainted him with the routines and authority structures of European psychiatry. While the novel is not a roman à clef, these experiences informed its textures of resort life and clinical oversight.
Published in 1934 by Charles Scribner’s Sons, Tender Is the Night entered a world transformed by the Depression and, in the United States, the end of Prohibition in late 1933. Critics and readers encountered a story that moved between the bright artifice of the mid-1920s and the sobering realism of the early 1930s. Its response was mixed at first, perhaps because the era it anatomized had so quickly receded. Over time, readers have recognized the book’s value as a document of its moment, tracing how private breakdowns and public crises intersect in a transatlantic culture built on credit, charm, and fragile assurances of control and cure.
Author Biography
Introduction
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896–1940) was an American novelist and short-story writer whose name has become synonymous with the Jazz Age. Rising to fame with his debut novel, This Side of Paradise, he went on to publish The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night, along with hundreds of magazine stories. The Great Gatsby, initially a modest commercial performer, is now widely regarded as a central work of twentieth‑century American literature. Fitzgerald also left an unfinished final novel, The Last Tycoon, published posthumously. His work charts the allure and consequences of ambition, wealth, romance, and social performance.
Fitzgerald’s reputation rests on prose that weds lyrical cadence to exacting social detail. He chronicled a generation coming of age amid prosperity and prohibition, mapping the era’s intoxicating glamour against private costs. He helped popularize the phrase “Jazz Age” in essays and stories, and his public life with Zelda Sayre seemed to epitomize the decade’s exuberance. Yet beneath the sparkle lay rigorous craft: careful architecture, symbolic patterning, and tonal control. He navigated a precarious literary economy, balancing serious novels with lucrative magazine fiction and later screenwriting. Across these forms, he explored aspiration, class mobility, and the fragile dream of self‑reinvention.
Education and Literary Influences
Fitzgerald grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, in a family attentive to education and cultural aspiration. He wrote early plays and stories while attending local schools and later the Newman School in New Jersey, where teachers encouraged his literary ambitions. In 1913 he entered Princeton University. There he devoted himself to writing for campus outlets, including musical comedies for the Triangle Club and work for student publications. His intense extracurricular schedule and uneven coursework hindered his progress. With the United States’ entry into the First World War, he left Princeton without a degree and accepted a commission as an army officer.
While Fitzgerald honed his craft at Princeton and afterward, he drew on a broad, documented set of influences. Romantic poetry, especially John Keats, informed his ear for cadence and titles, while novelists such as Henry James and Joseph Conrad offered models of structure and moral nuance. Magazine fiction taught him pacing and scene. His editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons, Maxwell Perkins, became an early champion and an exacting reader, shaping projects from first submission onward. Encounters with European expatriate circles and with contemporaries, notably Ernest Hemingway, challenged his sense of style and economy, even as he preserved a distinct lyricism.
Literary Career
During wartime service he drafted a first novel, The Romantic Egotist, which Scribner’s declined. Back in St. Paul after his discharge, he revised the material into This Side of Paradise, published by Scribner’s in 1920. The book’s lively portrait of modern youth made it an immediate sensation and secured his professional footing. Soon after its success, he married Zelda Sayre, whom he had met while stationed in Alabama. The couple’s move to New York and a suddenly public profile tied Fitzgerald to the new decade’s spirit. His first collection of stories, Flappers and Philosophers, appeared the same year.
Throughout the early 1920s, Fitzgerald supplemented novel writing with prolific magazine work, selling stories to widely read venues such as the Saturday Evening Post. Pieces like Bernice Bobs Her Hair, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, and Winter Dreams showcased his gift for social comedy and for fables about aspiration and status. The Beautiful and Damned, published in 1922, followed a young couple whose fortunes fray under the pressure of expectation and idleness. The novel expanded his range but received mixed notices. Still, the steady income from short fiction underwrote time for slower, more exacting work on his next project.
Fitzgerald conceived The Great Gatsby while living intermittently in New York and on the French Riviera in the mid‑1920s. He revised sentences and structure with unusual care, seeking a tight, musical design. Published in 1925, the novel earned respect from many critics but sold less than hoped. Over the decades, its reputation rose steadily as readers recognized its distilled portrayal of longing, illusion, and social intricacy in a modern American metropolis. The book’s economy, motifs, and narrative frame became hallmarks of his mature method. It also deepened his meditation on the distance between private desire and public identity.
In the later 1920s Fitzgerald moved between Europe and the United States, working under financial pressures and personal strain. He continued to publish finely made stories, and in the early 1930s he produced pieces such as Babylon Revisited, reflecting on loss amid the economic downturn. Tender Is the Night appeared in 1934 after a long and difficult gestation. Set among expatriates, it probes the erosions of love, status, and professional purpose. Contemporary reviews were mixed, and sales lagged, though the novel has since been reassessed as one of his major achievements for its structural daring and psychological depth.
Seeking steadier income, Fitzgerald went to Hollywood in 1937 as a contract screenwriter. The studio system valued his dialogue and story sense, though collaborative production often frustrated him. He received credit on the film Three Comrades and worked on other projects that were revised by others. He also drafted sharp, rueful sketches of studio life later collected as the Pat Hobby stories. During these years he began The Last Tycoon, a novel about power and imagination in the film industry, informed by observation of producers and executives. He pursued the book in intervals while juggling assignments and rebuilding his finances.
Beliefs and Advocacy
Fitzgerald was not a platform or party activist, but his published work expresses steady convictions about American aspiration and its moral costs. He viewed wealth and glamour as potent fictions that could both animate and distort character. His fiction attends to class boundaries, performance of identity, and the uneasy bargain between artistic integrity and commercial demands. During the Depression he wrote reflective essays—later gathered under the title The Crack‑Up—that examined exhaustion, resilience, and the limits of self‑reliance. Across genres, he advocated, by example, exacting revision and formal design, believing that style and structure bear ethical weight in representing experience.
Final Years & Legacy
The late 1930s were marked by uneven health, curtailed drinking, and efforts to stabilize work. Fitzgerald lived largely in California, where he maintained a disciplined schedule with periods of relapse and recovery. He developed a close companionship with journalist Sheilah Graham while continuing correspondence with friends and his longtime publisher. In 1940, while revising chapters of The Last Tycoon, he died of a heart attack in Hollywood. The novel remained unfinished at his death. Friends and editors assembled the available manuscript, notes, and synopsis for publication the following year, enabling readers to glimpse his evolving portrait of the studio era.
In the years after his death, Fitzgerald’s reputation rose dramatically. Scholars and general readers in the mid‑twentieth century recognized the precision of his style and the historical clarity of his themes. The Great Gatsby became widely taught, and Tender Is the Night gained renewed esteem. Posthumous collections, including The Last Tycoon and The Crack‑Up, extended understanding of his aims and struggles. His influence can be traced in later American fiction attentive to class, desire, and the theater of success. Film, stage, and television adaptations have kept his stories in circulation, while archival research has deepened appreciation of his craft.
Tender Is the Night
Tender is the Night.
New York: Scribners, 1934.
Already with thee! tender is the night
… …
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
—Ode to a Nightingale
To Gerald and Sara Many Fêtes
Book I.
I.
On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera[1], about half way between Marseilles[2] and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel. Deferential palms cool its flushed façade, and before it stretches a short dazzling beach. Lately it has become a summer resort of notable and fashionable people; a decade ago it was almost deserted after its English clientele went north in April. Now, many bungalows cluster near it, but when this story begins only the cupolas of a dozen old villas rotted like water lilies among the massed pines between Gausse’s Hôtel des Étrangers and Cannes[3], five miles away.
The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one. In the early morning the distant image of Cannes, the pink and cream of old fortifications, the purple Alp that bounded Italy, were cast across the water and lay quavering in the ripples and rings sent up by sea-plants through the clear shallows. Before eight a man came down to the beach in a blue bathrobe and with much preliminary application to his person of the chilly water, and much grunting and loud breathing, floundered a minute in the sea. When he had gone, beach and bay were quiet for an hour. Merchantmen crawled westward on the horizon; bus boys shouted in the hotel court; the dew dried upon the pines. In another hour the horns of motors began to blow down from the winding road along the low range of the Maures, which separates the littoral from true Provençal France.
A mile from the sea, where pines give way to dusty poplars, is an isolated railroad stop, whence one June morning in 1925 a victoria brought a woman and her daughter down to Gausse’s Hotel. The mother’s face was of a fading prettiness that would soon be patted with broken veins; her expression was both tranquil and aware in a pleasant way. However, one’s eye moved on quickly to her daughter, who had magic in her pink palms and her cheeks lit to a lovely flame, like the thrilling flush of children after their cold baths in the evening. Her fine forehead sloped gently up to where her hair, bordering it like an armorial shield, burst into lovelocks and waves and curlicues of ash blonde and gold. Her eyes were bright, big, clear, wet, and shining, the color of her cheeks was real, breaking close to the surface from the strong young pump of her heart. Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood—she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was still on her.
As sea and sky appeared below them in a thin, hot line the mother said:
“Something tells me we’re not going to like this place[1q].”
“I want to go home anyhow,” the girl answered[2q].
They both spoke cheerfully but were obviously without direction and bored by the fact—moreover, just any direction would not do. They wanted high excitement, not from the necessity of stimulating jaded nerves but with the avidity of prize-winning schoolchildren who deserved their vacations.
“We’ll stay three days and then go home. I’ll wire right away for steamer tickets[4q].”
At the hotel the girl made the reservation in idiomatic but rather flat French, like something remembered. When they were installed on the ground floor she walked into the glare of the French windows and out a few steps onto the stone veranda that ran the length of the hotel. When she walked she carried herself like a ballet-dancer, not slumped down on her hips but held up in the small of her back. Out there the hot light clipped close her shadow and she retreated—it was too bright to see. Fifty yards away the Mediterranean yielded up its pigments, moment by moment, to the brutal sunshine; below the balustrade a faded Buick cooked on the hotel drive.
Indeed, of all the region only the beach stirred with activity. Three British nannies sat knitting the slow pattern of Victorian England, the pattern of the forties, the sixties, and the eighties, into sweaters and socks, to the tune of gossip as formalized as incantation; closer to the sea a dozen persons kept house under striped umbrellas, while their dozen children pursued unintimidated fish through the shallows or lay naked and glistening with cocoanut oil out in the sun.
As Rosemary came onto the beach a boy of twelve ran past her and dashed into the sea with exultant cries. Feeling the impactive scrutiny of strange faces, she took off her bathrobe and followed. She floated face down for a few yards and finding it shallow staggered to her feet and plodded forward, dragging slim legs like weights against the resistance of the water. When it was about breast high, she glanced back toward shore: a bald man in a monocle[5] and a pair of tights, his tufted chest thrown out, his brash navel sucked in, was regarding her attentively. As Rosemary returned the gaze the man dislodged the monocle, which went into hiding amid the facetious whiskers of his chest, and poured himself a glass of something from a bottle in his hand.
Rosemary laid her face on the water and swam a choppy little four-beat crawl out to the raft. The water reached up for her, pulled her down tenderly out of the heat, seeped in her hair and ran into the corners of her body. She turned round and round in it, embracing it, wallowing in it. Reaching the raft she was out of breath, but a tanned woman with very white teeth looked down at her, and Rosemary, suddenly conscious of the raw whiteness of her own body, turned on her back and drifted toward shore. The hairy man holding the bottle spoke to her as she came out.
“I say—they have sharks out behind the raft.” He was of indeterminate nationality, but spoke English with a slow Oxford drawl. “Yesterday they devoured two British sailors from the flotte[4] at Golfe Juan.”
“Heavens!” exclaimed Rosemary.
“They come in for the refuse from the flotte.”
Glazing his eyes to indicate that he had only spoken in order to warn her, he minced off two steps and poured himself another drink.
Not unpleasantly selfconscious, since there had been a slight sway of attention toward her during this conversation, Rosemary looked for a place to sit. Obviously each family possessed the strip of sand immediately in front of its umbrella; besides there was much visiting and talking back and forth—the atmosphere of a community upon which it would be presumptuous to intrude. Farther up, where the beach was strewn with pebbles and dead seaweed, sat a group with flesh as white as her own. They lay under small hand-parasols instead of beach umbrellas and were obviously less indigenous to the place. Between the dark people and the light, Rosemary found room and spread out her peignoir on the sand.
Lying so, she first heard their voices and felt their feet skirt her body and their shapes pass between the sun and herself. The breath of an inquisitive dog blew warm and nervous on her neck[3q]; she could feel her skin broiling a little in the heat and hear the small exhausted wa-waa of the expiring waves. Presently her ear distinguished individual voices and she became aware that some one referred to scornfully as “that North guy” had kidnapped a waiter from a café in Cannes last night in order to saw him in two. The sponsor of the story was a white-haired woman in full evening dress, obviously a relic of the previous evening, for a tiara still clung to her head and a discouraged orchid expired from her shoulder. Rosemary, forming a vague antipathy to her and her companions, turned away.
Nearest her, on the other side, a young woman lay under a roof of umbrellas making out a list of things from a book open on the sand. Her bathing suit was pulled off her shoulders and her back, a ruddy, orange brown, set off by a string of creamy pearls, shone in the sun. Her face was hard and lovely and pitiful. Her eyes met Rosemary’s but did not see her. Beyond her was a fine man in a jockey cap and red-striped tights; then the woman Rosemary had seen on the raft, and who looked back at her, seeing her; then a man with a long face and a golden, leonine head, with blue tights and no hat, talking very seriously to an unmistakably Latin young man in black tights, both of them picking at little pieces of seaweed in the sand. She thought they were mostly Americans, but something made them unlike the Americans she had known of late.
After a while she realized that the man in the jockey cap was giving a quiet little performance for this group; he moved gravely about with a rake, ostensibly removing gravel and meanwhile developing some esoteric burlesque held in suspension by his grave face. Its faintest ramification had become hilarious, until whatever he said released a burst of laughter. Even those who, like herself, were too far away to hear, sent out antennæ of attention until the only person on the beach not caught up in it was the young woman with the string of pearls. Perhaps from modesty of possession she responded to each salvo of amusement by bending closer over her list.
The man of the monocle and bottle spoke suddenly out of the sky above Rosemary.
“You are a ripping swimmer.”
She demurred.
“Jolly good. My name is Campion. Here is a lady who says she saw you in Sorrento last week and knows who you are and would so like to meet you.”
Glancing around with concealed annoyance Rosemary saw the untanned people were waiting. Reluctantly she got up and went over to them.
“Mrs. Abrams—Mrs. McKisco—Mr. McKisco—Mr. Dumphry—
“We know who you are,” spoke up the woman in evening dress. “You’re Rosemary Hoyt and I recognized you in Sorrento and asked the hotel clerk and we all think you’re perfectly marvellous and we want to know why you’re not back in America making another marvellous moving picture.”
They made a superfluous gesture of moving over for her. The woman who had recognized her was not a Jewess, despite her name. She was one of those elderly “good sports” preserved by an imperviousness to experience and a good digestion into another generation.
“We wanted to warn you about getting burned the first day,” she continued cheerily, “because your skin is important, but there seems to be so darn much formality on this beach that we didn’t know whether you’d mind.”
II.
“We thought maybe you were in the plot,” said Mrs. McKisco. She was a shabby-eyed, pretty young woman with a disheartening intensity. “We don’t know who’s in the plot and who isn’t. One man my husband had been particularly nice to turned out to be a chief character—practically the assistant hero.”
“The plot?” inquired Rosemary, half understanding. “Is there a plot?”
“My dear, we don’t know,” said Mrs. Abrams, with a convulsive, stout woman’s chuckle. “We’re not in it. We’re the gallery[5q].”
Mr. Dumphry, a tow-headed effeminate young man, remarked: “Mama Abrams is a plot in herself,” and Campion shook his monocle at him, saying: “Now, Royal, don’t be too ghastly for words.” Rosemary looked at them all uncomfortably, wishing her mother had come down here with her. She did not like these people, especially in her immediate comparison of them with those who had interested her at the other end of the beach. Her mother’s modest but compact social gift got them out of unwelcome situations swiftly and firmly. But Rosemary had been a celebrity for only six months, and sometimes the French manners of her early adolescence and the democratic manners of America, these latter superimposed, made a certain confusion and let her in for just such things.
Mr. McKisco, a scrawny, freckle-and-red man of thirty, did not find the topic of the “plot” amusing. He had been staring at the sea—now after a swift glance at his wife he turned to Rosemary and demanded aggressively:
“Been here long?”
“Only a day.”
“Oh.”
Evidently feeling that the subject had been thoroughly changed, he looked in turn at the others.
“Going to stay all summer?” asked Mrs. McKisco, innocently. “If you do you can watch the plot unfold.”
“For God’s sake, Violet, drop the subject!” exploded her husband. “Get a new joke, for God’s sake!”
Mrs. McKisco swayed toward Mrs. Abrams and breathed audibly:
“He’s nervous.”
“I’m not nervous,” disagreed McKisco. “It just happens I’m not nervous at all.”
He was burning visibly—a grayish flush had spread over his face, dissolving all his expressions into a vast ineffectuality. Suddenly remotely conscious of his condition he got up to go in the water, followed by his wife, and seizing the opportunity Rosemary followed.
Mr. McKisco drew a long breath, flung himself into the shallows and began a stiff-armed batting of the Mediterranean, obviously intended to suggest a crawl—his breath exhausted he arose and looked around with an expression of surprise that he was still in sight of shore.
“I haven’t learned to breathe yet. I never quite understood how they breathed.” He looked at Rosemary inquiringly.
“I think you breathe out under water,” she explained. “And every fourth beat you roll your head over for air.”
“The breathing’s the hardest part for me. Shall we go to the raft?”
The man with the leonine head lay stretched out upon the raft, which tipped back and forth with the motion of the water. As Mrs. McKisco reached for it a sudden tilt struck her arm up roughly, whereupon the man started up and pulled her on board.
“I was afraid it hit you.” His voice was slow and shy; he had one of the saddest faces Rosemary had ever seen, the high cheekbones of an Indian, a long upper lip, and enormous deep-set dark golden eyes. He had spoken out of the side of his mouth, as if he hoped his words would reach Mrs. McKisco by a circuitous and unobtrusive route; in a minute he had shoved off into the water and his long body lay motionless toward shore.
Rosemary and Mrs. McKisco watched him. When he had exhausted his momentum he abruptly bent double, his thin thighs rose above the surface, and he disappeared totally, leaving scarcely a fleck of foam behind.
“He’s a good swimmer,” Rosemary said.
Mrs. McKisco’s answer came with surprising violence.
“Well, he’s a rotten musician.” She turned to her husband, who after two unsuccessful attempts had managed to climb on the raft, and having attained his balance was trying to make some kind of compensatory flourish, achieving only an extra stagger. “I was just saying that Abe North may be a good swimmer but he’s a rotten musician.”
“Yes,” agreed McKisco, grudgingly. Obviously he had created his wife’s world, and allowed her few liberties in it.
“Antheil[7]’s my man.” Mrs. McKisco turned challengingly to Rosemary, “Anthiel and Joyce. I don’t suppose you ever hear much about those sort of people in Hollywood, but my husband wrote the first criticism of Ulysses[6] that ever appeared in America.”
“I wish I had a cigarette,” said McKisco calmly. “That’s more important to me just now.”
“He’s got insides—don’t you think so, Albert?”
Her voice faded off suddenly. The woman of the pearls had joined her two children in the water, and now Abe North came up under one of them like a volcanic island, raising him on his shoulders. The child yelled with fear and delight and the woman watched with a lovely peace, without a smile.
“Is that his wife?” Rosemary asked.
“No, that’s Mrs. Diver. They’re not at the hotel.” Her eyes, photographic, did not move from the woman’s face. After a moment she turned vehemently to Rosemary.
“Have you been abroad before?”
“Yes—I went to school in Paris.”
“Oh! Well then you probably know that if you want to enjoy yourself here the thing is to get to know some real French families. What do these people get out of it?” She pointed her left shoulder toward shore. “They just stick around with each other in little cliques. Of course, we had letters of introduction and met all the best French artists and writers in Paris. That made it very nice.”
“I should think so.”
“My husband is finishing his first novel, you see.”
Rosemary said: “Oh, he is?” She was not thinking anything special, except wondering whether her mother had got to sleep in this heat.
“It’s on the idea of Ulysses,” continued Mrs. McKisco. “Only instead of taking twenty-four hours my husband takes a hundred years. He takes a decayed old French aristocrat and puts him in contrast with the mechanical age—”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Violet, don’t go telling everybody the idea,” protested McKisco. “I don’t want it to get all around before the book’s published.”
Rosemary swam back to the shore, where she threw her peignoir over her already sore shoulders and lay down again in the sun. The man with the jockey cap was now going from umbrella to umbrella carrying a bottle and little glasses in his hands; presently he and his friends grew livelier and closer together and now they were all under a single assemblage of umbrellas—she gathered that some one was leaving and that this was a last drink on the beach. Even the children knew that excitement was generating under that umbrella and turned toward it—and it seemed to Rosemary that it all came from the man in the jockey cap.
Noon dominated sea and sky—even the white line of Cannes, five miles off, had faded to a mirage of what was fresh and cool; a robin-breasted sailing boat pulled in behind it a strand from the outer, darker sea. It seemed that there was no life anywhere in all this expanse of coast except under the filtered sunlight of those umbrellas, where something went on amid the color and the murmur.
Campion walked near her, stood a few feet away and Rosemary closed her eyes, pretending to be asleep; then she half-opened them and watched two dim, blurred pillars that were legs. The man tried to edge his way into a sand-colored cloud, but the cloud floated off into the vast hot sky. Rosemary fell really asleep.
She awoke drenched with sweat to find the beach deserted save for the man in the jockey cap, who was folding a last umbrella. As Rosemary lay blinking, he walked nearer and said:
“I was going to wake you before I left. It’s not good to get too burned right away.”
“Thank you.” Rosemary looked down at her crimson legs.
“Heavens!”
She laughed cheerfully, inviting him to talk, but Dick Diver was already carrying a tent and a beach umbrella up to a waiting car, so she went into the water to wash off the sweat. He came back and gathering up a rake, a shovel, and a sieve, stowed them in a crevice of a rock. He glanced up and down the beach to see if he had left anything.
“Do you know what time it is?” Rosemary asked.
“It’s about half-past one.”
They faced the seascape together momentarily.
“It’s not a bad time,” said Dick Diver. “It’s not one of worst times of the day.”
He looked at her and for a moment she lived in the bright blue worlds of his eyes, eagerly and confidently. Then he shouldered his last piece of junk and went up to his car, and Rosemary came out of the water, shook out her peignoir and walked up to the hotel.
III.
It was almost two when they went into the dining-room. Back and forth over the deserted tables a heavy pattern of beams and shadows swayed with the motion of the pines outside. Two waiters, piling plates and talking loud Italian, fell silent when they came in and brought them a tired version of the table d’hôte luncheon.
“I fell in love on the beach,” said Rosemary[7q].
“Who with?”
“First with a whole lot of people who looked nice. Then with one man.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“Just a little. Very handsome. With reddish hair.” She was eating, ravenously. “He’s married though—it’s usually the way.”
Her mother was her best friend and had put every last possibility into the guiding of her, not so rare a thing in the theatrical profession, but rather special in that Mrs. Elsie Speers was not recompensing herself for a defeat of her own. She had no personal bitterness or resentments about life—twice satisfactorily married and twice widowed, her cheerful stoicism had each time deepened. One of her husbands had been a cavalry officer and one an army doctor, and they both left something to her that she tried to present intact to Rosemary. By not sparing Rosemary she had made her hard—by not sparing her own labor and devotion she had cultivated an idealism in Rosemary, which at present was directed toward herself and saw the world through her eyes. So that while Rosemary was a “simple” child she was protected by a double sheath of her mother’s armor and her own—she had a mature distrust of the trivial, the facile and the vulgar. However, with Rosemary’s sudden success in pictures Mrs. Speers felt that it was time she were spiritually weaned; it would please rather than pain her if this somewhat bouncing, breathless and exigent idealism would focus on something except herself.
“Then you like it here?” she asked.
“It might be fun if we knew those people. There were some other people, but they weren’t nice. They recognized me—no matter where we go everybody’s seen ‘Daddy’s Girl[11].’”
Mrs. Speers waited for the glow of egotism to subside; then she said in a matter-of-fact way: “That reminds me, when are you going to see Earl Brady?”
“I thought we might go this afternoon—if you’re rested.”
“You go—I’m not going.”
“We’ll wait till tomorrow then.”
“I want you to go alone. It’s only a short way—it isn’t as if you didn’t speak French.”
“Mother—aren’t there some things I don’t have to do?”
“Oh, well then go later—but some day before we leave.”
“All right, Mother.”
After lunch they were both overwhelmed by the sudden flatness that comes over American travellers in quiet foreign places. No stimuli worked upon them, no voices called them from without, no fragments of their own thoughts came suddenly from the minds of others, and missing the clamor of Empire they felt that life was not continuing here.
“Let’s only stay three days, Mother,” Rosemary said when they were back in their rooms. Outside a light wind blew the heat around, straining it through the trees and sending little hot gusts through the shutters.
“How about the man you fell in love with on the beach?”
“I don’t love anybody but you, Mother, darling.”
Rosemary stopped in the lobby and spoke to Gausse père about trains. The concierge, lounging in light-brown khaki by the desk, stared at her rigidly, then suddenly remembered the manners of his métier. She took the bus and rode with a pair of obsequious waiters to the station, embarrassed by their deferential silence, wanting to urge them: “Go on, talk, enjoy yourselves. It doesn’t bother me.”
The first-class compartment was stifling; the vivid advertising cards of the railroad companies—The Pont du Gard at Arles, the Amphitheatre at Orange, winter sports at Chamonix—were fresher than the long motionless sea outside. Unlike American trains that were absorbed in an intense destiny of their own, and scornful of people on another world less swift and breathless, this train was part of the country through which it passed. Its breath stirred the dust from the palm leaves, the cinders mingled with the dry dung in the gardens. Rosemary was sure she could lean from the window and pull flowers with her hand.
A dozen cabbies slept in their hacks outside the Cannes station. Over on the promenade the Casino, the smart shops, and the great hotels turned blank iron masks to the summer sea. It was unbelievable that there could ever have been a “season,” and Rosemary, half in the grip of fashion, became a little selfconscious, as though she were displaying an unhealthy taste for the moribund; as though people were wondering why she was here in the lull between the gaiety of last winter and next winter, while up north the true world thundered by.
