TO THE END OF his life Fitzgerald was puzzled by the com- parative failure of Tender Is the Night, after the years he spent on it and his efforts to make it the best American novel of his time. He had started it when he was living on the Riviera in the late summer of 1925. At first he had worked in bursts and had put aside the manuscript for months at a time while he wrote his profitable stories for the Saturday Evening Post; but early in 1932 he had found a more ambitious plan for it and had gone into debt to work on it steadily until the last chapters were written and the last dele- tions made in proof. He had watched it grow from a short dramatic novel like The Great Gatsby to a long psychological or philosophical novel on the model of Vanity Fair, and then, as he omitted scene after scene, he had watched it diminish again to a medium-length novel......