Published in 1934, Tender Is the Night was one of the mosttalked-about books of the year. "It's amazing how excellent much ofit is," Ernest Hemingway said to Maxwell Perkins. "I will say now,"John O'Hara wrote Fitzgerald, "Tender Is the Night is in the earlystages of being my favorite book, even more than This Side ofParadise." And Archibald MacLeish exclaimed: "Great God,Scott...You are a fine writer. Believe it -- not me." Set on the French Riviera in the late 1920s, Tender Is the Nightis the tragic romance of the young actress Rosemary Hoyt and thestylish American couple Dick and Nicole Diver. A brilliant youngpsychiatrist at the time of his marriage, Dick is both husband anddoctor to Nicole, whose wealth goads him into a lifestyle not hisown, and whose growing strength highlights Dick's harrowing demise.A profound study of the romantic concept of character -- lyrical,expansive, and hauntingly evocative -- Tender Is the Night, MabelDodge Luhan remarked, raised F. Scott Fitzgerald to the heights of"a modern Orpheus
【作者简介】
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in1896 and was educated at St. Paul Academy, the Newman School, andPrinceton University. In 1917 he left Princeton to join the armyand shortly after his demobilization sold his first short story tothe Smart Set, edited by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan.Encouraged by his early success Fitzgerald went on to write hisfirst novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), which was published byScribners when he was just twenty-three. An exuberant andunconventional novel of undergraduate life at Princeton, itimmediately established him as the bright light of his era -- thespokesman for the "jazz age." That same year Scott married ZeldaSayre and the notorious couple divided their time among New York,Paris, the Riviera, and Rome, becoming a part of the Americanexpatriate circle that included Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway,John Dos Passos, and Thomas Wolfe.
The crowning achievement of his career was his novel The GreatGatsby (1925), but Fitzgerald's popularity waned thereafter. In1930 Zelda suffered a nervous breakdown that required her to beinstitutionalized. Beset as he was by his wife's illness and hisown drinking problems, Fitzgerald was having a difficult timewriting Tender Is the Night (1934), for which he drew on both hisown experiences and Zelda's fifteen months in a Swiss sanitarium.To accommodate the high life-style to which he was accustomed, hecame to rely more and more on his commercial short story writingfor The Saturday Evening Post, Scribner's Magazine, and Esquire,earning at his peak more than $36,000 a year.
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