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“THANK YOU FOR LIKING IT WHEN IT COUNTED”: FIRST EDITION OF TENDER IS THE NIGHT, WARMLY INSCRIBED BY FITZGERALD TO A FELLOW HOLLYWOOD SCREENWRITER

FITZGERALD, F. Scott. Tender is the Night. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934. Octavo, original dark bluish green cloth, original dust jacket. Housed in a custom box.

First edition, warmly inscribed by Fitzgerald on the title page to a fellow Hollywood screenwriter: “Bartlett Cormack, Thank you for liking it when it counted, F. Scott Fitzgerald.” Also signed in Fitzgerald’s hand in pencil: “Bartlett Cormack/Paramount Hollywood.”

“For the title of his favorite among his books, the one he had wrought most painfully and carefully from his costly experience, Fitzgerald hit on a phrase from the ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’ evoking that poem’s timeless images of flight, dissolution, and the sweetness of death… it was Fitzgerald’s most ambitious work, his intended masterpiece… Everything hinged on Tender is the Night? He had Gatsby to his credit, but he wasn’t sure about Gatsby (Turnbull, 241-6). Cyril Connally called Tender is the Night “a wonderful evocation of the second phase of American expatriates ensconced in glittering villas on the Riviera in contrast to the home-spun tipplers of The Sun Also Rises. The break-down of a marriage is described with flashes of genius by an expert in self-destruction” (The Modern Movement, 79). In first issue dust jacket, with blurbs by Eliot, Mencken and Rosenfeld on front flap. Bruccoli A15.I.a. Book without front free endpaper (blank), otherwise absolutely fine and amazingly crisp, gilt perfect. Entirely unrestored dust jacket with only a touch of light rubbing to head of spine and very minor smudge to front panel, nearly fine and exceptionally bright. Seldom found inscribed, this is the most beautiful copy we have seen.