Set in the French Riviera during the twilight of the Jazz Age, the 1934 novel chronicles the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a promising young psychiatrist, and his wife, Nicole, who is one of his patients.

The story mirrors events in the lives of the author and his wife Zelda Fitzgerald as Dick starts his descent into alcoholism and Nicole struggles with mental illness.

[4][5] During the protracted writing process, the mental health of his wife rapidly deteriorated,[6] and she required extended hospitalization due to her suicidal and homicidal tendencies.

[7] After her hospitalization in Baltimore, Maryland, the author rented the La Paix estate in the suburb of Towson to be close to his wife, and he continued working on the manuscript.

He kept afloat by borrowing money from both his editor Max Perkins and his agent Harold Ober, as well as writing short stories for commercial magazines.

Rosemary senses something is wrong with the couple, and her suspicions are confirmed when another guest at a party, Violet McKisco, reports witnessing Nicole's nervous breakdown in a bathroom.

While visiting Franz, he meets a patient named Nicole Warren, a wealthy young woman whose sexual abuse by her father has led to mental neuroses.

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.

"[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.

Characters created in this early version survived into the final novel, particularly Abe and Mary North (originally Grant) and the McKiscos.

Film producer John W. Considine Jr. invited Fitzgerald to Hollywood during its golden age to write a flapper comedy for United Artists.

[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).

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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 an 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.

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.

[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.

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.

In 1955, an hour long adaptation was broadcast live by CBS on the General Electric sponsored show "Front Row Center", with Mercedes McCambridge as Nicole Diver.