Twenty-First Century Readings of ‘Tender is the Night’

Book excerpt: Bringing together established Fitzgerald scholars from the United Kingdom, Europe and North America, this collection offers eleven new readings of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1934 novel, Tender is the Night. While The Great Gatsby continues to attract more attention than the rest of Fitzgerald’s oeuvre combined, persistent, if infrequent, writings on Tender is the Night from the 1950s onwards indicate that, like Gatsby’s green light, Fitzgerald’s fourth novel continues both to perplex and intrigue. In addition to the inevitable biographical interpretations, the novel has, in myriad readings, been viewed as: a marriage novel, a text of disturbed psychology, a text nostalgically marking the passing of a talent and a time, an outdated “Jazz Age” story, and “the great novel about American history”. This new collection of essays opens criticism of Tender Is the Night to a new generation of scholars providing new ways for readers to appreciate this complex, compelling, and profound work.Contributors include editors of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, the general editor of the Cambridge Edition of Writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald, members of the Fitzgerald Society Executive, and the directors of the biennial F. Scott Fitzgerald conference. The book will be published to coincide with the biennial F. Scott Fitzgerald conference in July 2007.