In
Tender is the Night Fitzgerald distilled much of his own experience. Scott and Zelda kicked off "the greatest, gaudiest spree in history", and partied for a generation. The portrait of the Diver's tempestuous breakdown is made even more poignant by the knowledge of the wrecked FitzgeraldsJacket design: Kareem Iliya has worked for Tiffany&Co, Chanel, Saks, the
New Yorker and
VogueExclusive introductionF. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 -1940) is widely considered the poet laureate of the Jazz Age. He wrote many short stories and four novels,
This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and the Damned, Tender is the Night and
The Great Gatsby. An unfinished novel,
The Last Tycoon, was published posthumously.
**AS SEEN ON WRITE AROUND THE WORLD WITH RICHARD E GRANT**
It is the French Riviera in the 1920s. Nicole and Dick Diver are a wealthy, elegant, magnetic couple. A coterie of admirers are drawn to them, none more so than the blooming young starlet Rosemary Hoyt. When Rosemary falls for Dick, the Diver's calculated perfection begins to crack. As dark truths emerge, Fitzgerald shows both the disintegration of a marriage and the failure of idealism. Tender is the Night is as sad as it is beautiful.
A tragedy backlit by beautyFor Fitzgerald desolation is a precondition of the lyrical. Hence the most distinctive impression of
Tender: a beautiful novel about failureIt is one of those books that you read and feel a shift...the story is told so poetically and eloquently. It is one of those books that you read and think: if I could only remember that sentence - it is so beautifulNo one has written more elegiacally about America... Fitzgerald, like his revered Keats, was a compulsive nostalgic, locating happiness in the search for sensation rather than in its realisation; in the dream of desire, not in its fulfilmentIn just a snatch of dialogue or a few lines of description, Fitzgerald can evoke the happy, troubled and perilous balance of a group of friends... He has an acute eye and ear for the nuances of character... an exquisitely crafted piece of fiction
