Sojourn in Europe
While abroad in Europe, F. Scott Fitzgerald began writing his fourth novel almost three weeks after the publication of The Great Gatsby in April 1925.[4][5] He planned to tell the story of Francis Melarkey, a young Hollywood technician visiting the French Riviera with his domineering mother.[28] Francis falls in with a circle of charming American expatriates, emotionally disintegrates, and kills his mother.[28][5] Fitzgerald's tentative titles for the novel were "World's Fair," "Our Type" and "The Boy Who Killed His Mother."[29] The characters of the charming American expatriates were based on Fitzgerald's acquaintances Gerald and Sara Murphy and were named Seth and Dinah Piper.[30][31] Francis was intended to fall in love with Dinah, an event that would precipitate his disintegration.[30]
Fitzgerald wrote five drafts of this earlier version of the novel in 1925 and 1926, but he was unable to finish it.[32][5] Nearly all of what he wrote made it into the finished work in altered form.[32] Francis's arrival on the Riviera with his mother, and his introduction to the world of the Pipers, was transposed into Rosemary Hoyt's arrival with her mother, and her introduction to the world of Dick and Nicole Diver. Characters created in this early version survived into the final novel, particularly Abe and Mary North (originally Grant) and the McKiscos.[31]
Several incidents such as Rosemary's arrival and early scenes on the beach, her visit to the Riviera movie studio, and the dinner party at the Divers' villa all appeared in this original version, but with Francis in the role of the wide-eyed outsider that would later be filled by Rosemary.[33] Also, the sequence in which a drunken Dick is beaten by police in Rome was written in this first version as well and was based on a real incident that happened to Fitzgerald in Rome in 1924.[34][31]
Return to America
After a certain point, Fitzgerald became stymied with the novel. He, Zelda, and their daughter Scottie returned to the United States in December 1926 after several years in Europe. Film producer John W. Considine Jr. invited Fitzgerald to Hollywood during its golden age to write a flapper comedy for United Artists.[35] He agreed and moved into a studio-owned bungalow with Zelda in January 1927.[35] In Hollywood, the Fitzgeralds attended parties where they danced the black bottom and mingled with film stars.[36]
While attending a lavish party at the Pickfair estate, Fitzgerald met 17-year-old Lois Moran, a starlet who had gained widespread fame for her role in Stella Dallas (1925).[37] Desperate for intellectual conversation, Moran and Fitzgerald discussed literature and philosophy for hours while sitting on a staircase.[20] Fitzgerald was 31 years old and past his prime, but the smitten Moran regarded him as a sophisticated, handsome, and gifted writer.[38] Consequently, she pursued a relationship with him.[20] The starlet became a muse for the author, and he wrote her into a short story called "Magnetism", in which a young Hollywood film starlet causes a married writer to waver in his sexual devotion to his wife.[36] Fitzgerald later rewrote Rosemary Hoyt—one of the central characters in Tender is the Night—to mirror Moran.[39]
Jealous of Fitzgerald's relationship with Moran, an irate Zelda set fire to her expensive clothing in a bathtub as a self-destructive act.[40] She disparaged the teenage Moran as "a breakfast food that many men identified with whatever they missed from life."[41] Fitzgerald's relations with Moran further exacerbated the Fitzgeralds' marital difficulties and, after merely two months in Hollywood, the unhappy couple departed for Delaware in March 1927.[42]
Fitzgerald supported himself and his family in the late 1920s with his lucrative short-story output for slick magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post, but he was haunted by his inability to progress on the novel. Around 1929 he tried a new angle on the material, starting over with a shipboard story about a Hollywood director Lew Kelly and his wife Nicole as well as a young actress named Rosemary.[31] But Fitzgerald only completed two chapters of this version.[31]
Zelda's mental illness
The case of F. Scott Fitzgerald has become distressing. He is boozing in a wild manner and has become a nuisance. His wife, Zelda, who has been insane for years, is now confined at the Sheppard-Pratt Hospital, and he is living in Park Avenue with his little daughter, Scottie.
—H. L. Mencken, 1934 diary entry[43]
By Spring 1929, the Fitzgeralds had returned to Europe when Zelda's mental health deteriorated.[6] During an automobile trip to Paris along the mountainous roads of the Grande Corniche, Zelda seized the car's steering wheel and tried to kill herself, her husband F. Scott Fitzgerald, and their 9-year-old daughter Scottie by driving over a cliff.[44] After this homicidal incident, Zelda sought psychiatric treatment, and doctors diagnosed her with schizophrenia in June 1930.[7] Zelda's biographer, Nancy Milford, quotes Dr. Oscar Forel's contemporary psychiatric diagnosis:
"The more I saw Zelda, the more I thought at the time [that] she is neither [suffering from] a pure neurosis nor a real psychosis—I considered her a constitutional, emotionally unbalanced psychopath—she may improve, [but] never completely recover."[45]
Seeking a cure for her mental illness, the couple traveled to Switzerland where Zelda underwent further treatment at a clinic.[46] Zelda's ingravescent mental illness and the death of Fitzgerald's father in 1931 dispirited the author.[45][47] Devastated by these events, an alcoholic Fitzgerald settled in suburban Baltimore where he rented the La Paix estate from architect Bayard Turnbull.[3][48] He decided the novel's final plot would involve a young man of great potential who marries a mentally-ill woman and sinks into despair and alcoholism when their doomed marriage fails.[49]
Final draft and publication
Fitzgerald wrote the final version of Tender Is the Night in 1932 and 1933. He salvaged almost everything he had written for the earlier Melarkey draft of the novel,[3] as well as borrowed ideas and phrases from many short stories he had written in the years since completing The Great Gatsby. Ultimately, he poured everything he had into Tender—his feelings regarding his wasted talent and self-perceived professional failure; his animosity towards his parents;[50] his marriage to Zelda and her mental illness;[51] his infatuation with actress Lois Moran,[20] and Zelda's affair with the French aviator Edouard Jozan.[d]
Fitzgerald finished the work in the autumn of 1933, and it was serialized in Scribner's Magazine over four parts from January to April 1934, leading up to its release on April 12, 1934.[9] Although Edward Shenton provided illustrations for the serialization, he wasn't responsible for the book's jacket design, which was done by an unknown artist and not favored by Fitzgerald.[1] The title of the novel was inspired by John Keats' poem "Ode to a Nightingale".[11]
