505 0_ |a "Tender is the Night is the story of a brilliant and magnetic psychiatrist named Dick Diver the bewitching, wealthy, and dangerously unstable mental patient, Nicole, who becomes his wife and the beautiful, harrowing ten-year pas de deux they act out along the border between sanity and madness. In the story, Fitzgerald deliberately set out to write the most ambitious and far-reaching novel of his career, experimenting radically with narrative conventions of chronology and point of view and drawing on early breakthroughs in psychiatry to enrich his account of the makeup and breakdown of character and culture. The story is also the most intensely, even painfully, autobiographical of Fitzgerald's novels it smolders with a dark, bitter vitality because it is so utterly true. This account of a caring man who disintegrates under the twin strains of his wife's derangement and a lifestyle that gnaws away at his sense of moral values offers an authorial cri de coeur, while Dick Diver's downward spiral into alcoholic dissolution is an eerie portent of Fitzgerald's own fate."--Publisher description.