Fitzgerald deemed the novel to be his masterwork and believed it would eclipse the acclaim of his previous works.[52] It was instead met with lukewarm sales and mixed reviews.[53] One book review in The New York Times by critic J. Donald Adams was particularly harsh:
"Bad news is best blurted out at once: Tender Is the Night is a disappointment. Though it displays Mr. Fitzgerald’s most engaging qualities, it makes his weaknesses appear ineradicable, for they are present in equal measure and in undiminished form.... His new book is clever and brilliantly surfaced, but it is not the work of a wise and mature novelist."[54]
In contrast to the negative review in The New York Times, critic Burke Van Allen hailed the novel as a masterpiece in a April 1934 review in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle:[55]
"Besides Mr. Fitzgerald, no American novelist... has written four novels without a bad one, with a constantly growing mastery of his equipment, and a regularly increasing sensitivity to the esthetic values in life. Scott Fitzgerald grows, and his literature was born imposing... The variation of mood with which he has four times accomplished... is extraordinary. The mood in This Side of Paradise was vindictive and rebellious; in The Beautiful and Damned sour and satirical; in Gatsby straightforward and tragic, inevitable, and in Tender Is the Night it is stained with a civilized and wounding brutality. It is necessary to say that I, the reviewer, have never used this severe word in print before: masterpiece."[55]
Three months after its publication, Tender Is the Night had sold only 12,000 copies compared to This Side of Paradise which sold over 50,000 copies.[4] Despite a number of positive reviews, a consensus emerged that the novel's Jazz Age setting and subject matter were both outdated and uninteresting to readers.[4] The unexpected failure of the novel puzzled Fitzgerald for the remainder of his life.[4]
Various hypotheses have arisen as to why the novel did not receive a warmer reception upon release. Fitzgerald's friend, author Ernest Hemingway, opined that critics had initially only been interested in dissecting its weaknesses, rather than giving due credit to its merits.[56] He argued that such overly harsh criticism stemmed from superficial readings of the material and Depression-era America's reaction to Fitzgerald's status as a symbol of Jazz Age excess.[57][58] In his later years, Hemingway re-read the work and remarked that, in retrospect, "Tender Is the Night gets better and better".[56]
