Tender is the Night

F. Scott FITZGERALD

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Tender is the Night

“HIS FAVORITE AMONG HIS BOOKS”: TENDER IS THE NIGHT IN SCARCE DUST JACKET

FITZGERALD, F. Scott. Tender is the Night. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934. Octavo, original dark green cloth, original pictorial dust jacket.

First edition, second printing, in scarce second issue dust jacket, printed in the same month as the first issue.

“For the title of his favorite among his books, the one he had wrought most painfully and carefully from his costly experience, Fitzgerald hit on a phrase from the ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’ evoking that poem’s timeless images of flight, dissolution, and the sweetness of death… Into Tender is the Night he put his hard-earned beliefs: that work was the only dignity; that it didn’t help a serious man to be too much flattered and loved; that money and beauty were treacherous aides; that honor, courtesy, courage—the old-fashioned virtues—were the best guides after all… it was Fitzgerald’s most ambitious work, his intended masterpiece… Everything hinged on Tender is the Night…. he was nervous about it on several counts. The man who had begun it in 1925, who had fashioned the beautiful barbarism of its opening sequences, wasn’t the same man who completed it in 1933; in between, Zelda’s breakdown, the crumbling of American prosperity, and other reverses had changed and darkened his sensibility” (Turnbull, 241-46). In second issue dust jacket, with blurbs by Colum, Seldes and Rawlings on front flap. Bruccoli A15.I.a.

Book fine. Bright, lovely dust jacket with small chipping to head and foot of spine panel and a few marginal tears. A near-fine copy.

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