Tender is the Night

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Tender Is the Night book cover

Tender Is the Night, first published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1934, is a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The title is taken from the poem "Ode to a Nightingale" by John Keats.

In 1932, Fitzgerald's wife Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was hospitalized for schizophrenia in Baltimore, Maryland. The author rented the "la Paix" estate in the suburb of Towson to work on this book, the story of the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a promising young psychoanalyst and his wife, Nicole, who is also one of his patients. It would be Fitzgerald's first novel in nine years, and the last that he would complete. While working on the book he several times ran out of cash and had to borrow from his editor and agent, and write short stories for commercial magazines. The early 1930s, when Fitzgerald was conceiving and working on the book, were certainly the darkest years of his life, and accordingly, the novel has its bleak elements.

Fitzgerald modeled the characters of Dick and Nicole Diver after his longtime friends, Gerald and Sara Murphy. The Murphys were a wealthy American expatriate couple who frequently entertained the Fitzgeralds and others of the Lost Generation at their home on the French Riviera. The Hotel d'Etrangers is based on the Hotel du Cap Eden Roc where the author stayed. Although the Divers possessed the glamour of the Murphys, the tragedy of the Divers' marriage more accurately reflected Fitzgerald's own marriage to his wife Zelda, and not that of the Murphys.

It should also be noted that two versions of this novel are in print. The first version, published in 1934, uses flashbacks whilst the second revised version, prepared by Fitzgerald's friend the noted critic Malcolm Cowley on the basis of notes for a revision left by Fitzgerald, is ordered chronologically; this version was first published posthumously in 1951. Critics have suggested that Fitzgerald's revision was undertaken due to negative reviews of the temporal structure of the book on its first release.

Fitzgerald's work also appears in Michelangelo Antonioni's 1960 film L'Avventura as the book Anna was reading before she disappeared.

The film 1962 film Tender is the Night, based on the novel, starred Jason Robards and Jennifer Jones as the Divers. The song "Tender is the Night", from the movie soundtrack, was nominated for the 1962 Academy Award for Best Song.

A television mini-series of the book, with Mary Steenburgen and Peter Strauss as Nicole and Dick, was made by the BBC and shown in 1985 on the BBC in the United Kingdom, the CBC in Canada, and on Showtime in the United States. Often praised as a brilliant adaptation with an outstanding performance by Steenburgen, this production has never been released on DVD and has since been shown in the US only once, on Bravo (television network).