Tender Is the Night

Tender Is the Night is the fourth and final novel F. Scott Fitzgerald completed, published in 1934. It is set on the French Riviera towards the end of the Jazz Age, and it chronicles the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a promising young psychiatrist, and his wife Nicole.

Dick Diver meets the Warren family while working in Europe, marries Nicole after treating her, and settles into a life supported by her wealth. The novel follows the couple through the social world of the Riviera and Paris, where money and reputation make the arrangements look effortless, and then through the years in which his professional standing and his marriage come apart, with the book's interest fixed on how long that takes and how visible it is to the people watching.

Fitzgerald wrote the novel over nearly a decade and reorganised its structure afterwards, so editions differ in where the story begins. Its subject is a gifted man who is slowly spent by the life he has chosen, and it is often read alongside the author's own biography.