An insight into the mind of F Scott Fitzgerald, from Malcolm Cowley. Originally published in The New Republic on August 20, 1951.
Tender Is The Night was published in the spring of 1934…. It dealt with fashionable life in the 1920’s at a time when many readers wanted to forget that they had ever been concerned with frivolities; the new fashion was for novels about destitution and revolt….Nor was it a popular success as compared with Fitzgerald’s first three novels, which had been easier to write: in the first season it sold 12,000 copies; This Side of Paradise had sold 50,000 in a similar period. Presently the new book seemed to be forgotten, although it really wasn’t; it stayed in people’s minds like a regret or an unanswered question. “A strange thing is that in retrospect his Tender Is the Night gets better and better,” Ernest Hemingway told Maxwell Perkins, of Scribner’s, who was the editor of both novelists. In scores of midnight arguments that I remember, other writers discovered that they had the same feeling about the book.
Fitzgerald continued to brood about it, although he didn’t blame the public or the critics. It was one of the conditions of the game he played with life to accept the rules as they were written; if he lost point and set after playing his hardest, that was due to some mistake in strategy to be corrected in the future. He began looking for the mistake in Tender Is the Night….
Read how Fitzgerald re-wrote the novel at How F. Scott Fitzgerald Wrote and Revised Tender Is the Night | New Republic.