F. Scott Fitzgerald published Tender Is the Night in 1934. Charles Scribner’s Sons released the novel in hardcover on April 12 of that year, after it had been serialized in Scribner’s Magazine.
The novel follows Dick Diver, a talented American psychiatrist, and Nicole Diver, his wealthy patient and wife, among expatriates on the French Riviera. Its themes include marriage, mental illness, alcoholism, wealth, professional decline, and the collapse of the glamorous world associated with the Jazz Age.
Fitzgerald worked on the book for years, beginning soon after The Great Gatsby appeared in 1925. His writing was affected by financial pressure, heavy drinking, and Zelda Fitzgerald’s severe mental-health struggles. Those experiences influenced the novel without making it a simple autobiography.
A common source of confusion is that a revised, chronologically rearranged version appeared posthumously in 1948. That edition was prepared by Malcolm Cowley from Fitzgerald’s notes. The original 1934 publication, however, used a more fragmented structure and remains the standard answer to the publication-year question.