F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in a friend's copy of "Tender Is the Night, " "If you liked "The Great Gatsby, " for God's sake read this. "Gatsby" was a tour de force but this is a confession of faith." Set in the South of France in the decade after World War I, "Tender Is the Night" is the story of a brilliant and magnetic psychiatrist named Dick Diver; the bewitching, wealthy, and dangerously unstable mental patient, Nicole, who becomes his wife; and the beautiful, harrowing ten-year pas de deux they act out along the border between sanity and madness.In "Tender Is the Night, " Fitzgerald deliberately set out to write the most ambitious and far-reaching novel of his career, experimenting radically with narrative conventions of chronology and point of view and drawing on early breakthroughs in psychiatry to enrich his account of the makeup and breakdown of character and culture."Tender Is the Night" is also the most intensely, even painfully, autobiographical of Fitzgerald's novels; it smolders with a dark, bitter vitality because it is so utterly true. This account of a caring man who disintegrates under the twin strains of his wife's derangement and a lifestyle that gnaws away at his sense of moral values offers an authorial cri de coeur, while Dick Diver's downward spiral into alcoholic dissolution is an eerie portent of Fitzgerald's own fate.F. Scott Fitzgerald literally put his soul into "Tender Is the Night, " and the novel's lack of commercial success upon its initial publication in 1934 shattered him. He would die six years later without having published another novel, and without knowing that "Tender Is the Night" would come to be seen as perhaps its author's most poignant masterpiece. In Mabel Dodge Luhan's words, it raised him to the heights of "a modern Orpheus."

F·S·菲茨杰拉德（Francis Scott Fitzgerald，1896—1940）

二十世纪美国最杰出的作家之一，以诗人和梦想家的气质为“爵士时代”吟唱华丽挽歌。短短四十四年的人生，他的遭际几经跌宕起伏，在名利场中看尽世态炎凉。二十世纪末，美国学术界权威在百年英语长河中选出一百部最优秀的小说，凝聚了菲茨杰拉德才华横溢的两部长篇小说《了不起的盖茨比》和《夜色温柔》均榜上有名，前者更高居第二位。