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 that springs from the quality of Fitzgerald s writing and the tragic personal experiences on which the novel is based.

Six years separate Tender is the Night and The Last Tycoon, the novel Fitzgerald left unfinished at his death in December 1940. Fitzgerald lived in Hollywood more or less continuously from July 1937 until his death, and a novel about the film industry at the height of the studio system centred on the working life of a top producer was begun in 1939.

Even in its incomplete state The Last Tycoon remains the greatest American novel about Hollywood and contains some of Fitzgerald s most brilliant writing.

Francis Scott (Key) Fitzgerald

was born in St Paul, Minnesota in 1896. He was given three names after the writer of The Star Spangled Banner, to whom he was distantly related. His father, Edward Fitzgerald, was a Southern gentleman and failed businessman. His mother, Mary McQuillan, was the daughter of an Irish furniture wholesaler.

In 1913 Fitzgerald went to Princeton University but did not graduate. Instead, he joined the army was discharged in 1919. During that time he met Zelda Sayre, who he married in 1920.

In the same year as his marriage, his first novel, This Side of Paradise, was published and became an instant success, enabling Fitzgerald and Zelda to pursue the decadent lifestyle they craved.

In 1922 they moved to the affluent Long Island community of Great Neck, which provided Fitzgerald with the material for his novel, The Great Gatsby (1925). The book was well received by the critics but did not bring the financial rewards he had hoped for and in order to finance his extravagant lifestyle Fitzgerald wrote stories for various magazines.

His published works include, Tender Is the Night (1934), The Diamond as Big as The Ritz (1922), The Beautiful and Damned (1922) and The Last Tycoon (1941)

During the next five years the Fitzgeralds travelled back and forth between Europe and America as they found Europe cheaper to live in. In 1930 Zelda suffered the first of many nervous breakdowns, and was hospitalized on a number of occasions both in Europe and America. Fitzgerald, meanwhile was drinking heavily. In 1937 he travelled to Hollywood where he met the gossip columnist, Sheila Graham, with whom he lived for the rest of his life. He died of a heart attack in her apartment on December 21st, 1940. Zelda died in a hospital fire in 1948.