Tender Is the Night
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is the Night
FictionRomancePsychological Fiction
3.76from 154,272 ratingson Goodreads
On the French Riviera in the 1920s a young film actress falls in love with Dick and Nicole Diver, the most charming couple on the beach. Behind the charm is a marriage with a history, and a gifted young psychiatrist slowly spending himself. Fitzgerald's last completed novel (1934).
Contains spoilers for the entire book
- Themes
- Atmosphere
About the book
Published in 1934, Tender Is the Night opens on the French Riviera in the 1920s, where the young film actress Rosemary Hoyt is drawn into the glamorous circle of Dick and Nicole Diver, a charming American couple at the centre of a fashionable set. The novel then moves back in time to reveal how Dick, a gifted psychiatrist, came to marry Nicole, who had been his patient. F. Scott Fitzgerald drew on the expatriate world he knew in France and on his own marriage to Zelda, and took his title from Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”. The book traces the slow erosion of a brilliant man’s promise amid wealth, drink and the demands of love, and Fitzgerald considered it his most ambitious work.
Characters
Dick Diver — Protagonist
A gifted American psychiatrist whose charm and ambition are tested by marriage and expatriate life.
Nicole Diver — Dick's wife
A wealthy woman whose psychological vulnerability complicates the boundaries between marriage and care.
Rosemary Hoyt — Actress
A young film actress whose fascination with the Divers disturbs their apparently enviable world.
Tommy Barban — Soldier
A restless professional soldier closely attached to Nicole and the Divers' circle.
Baby Warren — Nicole's sister
A protective and controlling heiress who uses family wealth to manage Nicole's future.
Abe North — Musician
A gifted member of the expatriate circle whose drinking undermines his promise.
About the author
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) was an American novelist and short-story writer who named the Jazz Age and then wrote its best obituary. The Great Gatsby appeared in 1925, sold modestly, and was still in print largely as a curiosity when he died at forty-four believing himself a failure; it is now among the most widely read American novels. He wrote about money and class from close up — the wanting, the having, and the difference between the two. His other novels are This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned and Tender Is the Night.