When it was first published in 1934, reviewers and readers picked up Tender Is the Night with some trepidation. It had been nearly a decade since his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, had been published, and there were rumors in literary circles that Fitzgerald was done for as a writer. Although the book did not sell nearly as well as his earlier books, reviewers were generally favorable in their response to Fitzgerald's new book. (Tender Is the Night sold about fifteen thousand copies in 1934, according to Matthew J. Bruccoli, writing in his introduction to Reader's Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night, compared to the forty-one thousand copies This Side of Paradise sold in its first year of publication and the fifty thousand copies The Beautiful and the Damned sold in its first year.) Over the years, critics and scholars have come to regard Tender Is...