With the obvious exception of The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night is Fitzgerald's best-known novel. As with The Great Gatsby, its genesis lies in that period of the mid-i92os when Fitzgerald's creative talents were rescued from the temptations of writing 'primers' on adolescent sexual activity or guidebooks for would-be 'flappers', and his attachment to the model of what he called the 'Wells-Shaw-Chesterton-Mackenzie combination' that he had identified as his fictional ideal whilst training as an officer at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas in i918. The more demanding models of Joseph Conrad and Anatole France inform the achievement of The Great Gatsby, particularly, of course, the 'discovery' of the sympathetic 'middle-man narrator' (pace Marlow in Heart of Darkness) who both edits his author's material and guides his readers' judgements. ...

Tender is the Night is a story set in the hedonistic high society of Europe during the 'Roaring Twenties'.A wealthy schizophrenic, Nicole Warren, falls in love with Dick Diver - her psychiatrist. The resulting saga of the Divers' troubled marriage and their circle of friends, includes a cast of aristocratic and beautiful people, unhappy love affairs, a duel, incest, and the problems inherent in the possession of great wealth.

Despite cataloguing a maelstrom of interpersonal conflict, Tender is the Night has a poignancy and warmth which springs from the quality of F. Scott Fitzgerald's writing and the tragic personal experiences on which the book is based.