Tender is the Night
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940), 1934
A young actress falls in with a glamorous American couple on the Riviera, and the marriage underneath all that charm begins to show its seams. The prose is lyrical and melancholic, carrying a sense of longing and fragile glamour as the characters unravel.
Feels like melancholy, longing and unease. About love, madness and ambition.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy stories about complex relationships and the cost of ambition. Be aware that the atmosphere is deeply wistful and deals with themes of mental fragility.
Why read it
Read this novel to witness the beautiful decay of high society and the fragile nature of love.
A page from the book
Some novels are built out of the author's own marriage.
In 1934, after years of toil, Fitzgerald finally published his fourth novel, Tender is the Night, about an American psychiatrist in Paris, France, and his troubled marriage to a wealthy patient. The book was inspired by his wife Zelda’s struggle with mental illness. F. Scott Fitzgerald.Fitzgerald took his title from Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale' — 'Already with thee! tender is the night' — and drew on his wife Zelda's breakdowns and the Swiss clinics that treated her.
Books that feel like this
More by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925
A short, dazzling novel about a summer of parties on Long Island and the man who throws them for one reason. Every sentence is built to be reread, and the ending is hard to shake.
Short Fiction
F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1920
Fitzgerald's short stories are where he tried everything — jazz-age comedy, a man born old, first love, a girl who bobs her hair — in twenty pages or less.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is Tender is the Night for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy stories about complex relationships and the cost of ambition. Be aware that the atmosphere is deeply wistful and deals with themes of mental fragility.
- What is Tender is the Night like?
- The prose is lyrical and melancholic, carrying a sense of longing and fragile glamour as the characters unravel. Feels like melancholy, longing and unease. About love, madness and ambition.
- What should I read after Tender is the Night?
- If you liked Tender is the Night, try Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert), Norwegian Wood (Haruki Murakami) and The Night We Met (Abby Jimenez).
A taste of the feed
Some love feels less like a shelter than a match.
Maybe this isn’t the kind of love that deserves to exist. Maybe it’s the kind that wars start over. The kind that topples empires and never leaves the world better than it found it.
The Night We Met · Abby Jimenez
What it feels like to be certain of something that could kill you.
About three things I was absolutely positive. First, Edward was a vampire. Second, there was part of him — and I didn’t know how potent that part might be — that thirsted for my blood. And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.
Twilight · Stephenie Meyer
To feel young and ancient at once, and find the day dangerous.
She would not say of anyone in the world now that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.
Mrs. Dalloway · Virginia Woolf
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