Tender Is the Night

Description: F. Scott Fitzgerald began composing Tender Is the Night in the summer of 1925, but he struggled with the novel and reworked it intensively over the next nine years. A study of the disintegration of a talented young American psychiatrist, set among wealthy American expatriates living in Europe after the First World War, the novel, finally published in 1934, is now considered one of his major works. Fitzgerald saved a great many of his working materials - notes, diagrams, holographs, typescripts, proofs and correspondence - making it possible to reconstruct in detail the passage of Tender Is the Night from manuscript to print. The Cambridge edition follows the order of the first edition; it includes a history of composition, an analysis of Fitzgerald's plan for republication and an explanation of the chronology of the narrative. The edition also contains full historical annotations, facsimiles of surviving drafts and a record of emendations.

Brief description: James L. W. West, III is Edwin Erle Spacks Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University.

Review Quotes: "Arriving at an accurate and authoritative edition of Fitzgerald could hardly be more worthwhile, and West has done it superlatively. ... [he] is doing a tremendously valuable service to Fitzgerald in particular and American literature in general, and we are all in his debt."
Scott Donaldson, The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review