White is the publisher of the Seattle-based Scala House Press. In this essay, White argues that the novel's structure is an integral part of Tender Is the Night and helps to deepen the reader's understanding of the novel.

One of the criticisms leveled at Tender Is the Night shortly following its publication concerned its structure. F. Scott Fitzgerald's use of flashback in Book Two, many critics felt, resulted in an unwieldy book. Writing in the St. Paul Dispatch, James Gray called the novel "big, sprawling, [and] badly coordinated" and went on to criticize the book for its "technical fault of poor organization." The issue of its organization plagued Fitzgerald so much in the years following the book's publication that he began to wonder if he should not have presented the story chronologically. A decade after Fitzgerald's death, Malcolm Cowley used the author's personal notes to justify the...