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Price: US$30000.00 + shipping
Description: First edition of the work which Fitzgerald considered to be his finest. Octavo, original green cloth. Inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper "For Lillian Abercrombie with best wishes of a fellow Celt F. Scott Fitzgerald." In near fine condition. Housed in a custom full morocco clamshell and chemise box. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in a friend's copy of Tender Is the Night, "If you liked The Great Gatsby, for God's sake read this. Gatsby was a tour de force but this is a confession of faith." Set in the South of France in the decade after World War I, 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. Tender Is the Night 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. F. Scott Fitzgerald literally put his soul into Tender Is the Night, and the novel's lack of commercial success upon its initial publication in 1934 shattered him. He would die six years later without having published another novel, and without knowing that Tender Is the Night would come to be seen as perhaps his masterpiece. In Mabel Dodge Luhan's words, it raised him to the heights of "a modern Orpheus." Named by Modern Library as one of the 100 greatest novels of the twentieth century. It was basis for the 1962 film directed by Henry King starring Jennifer Jones and Jason Robards. The soundtrack featured a song, also called Tender Is the Night, by Sammy Fain (music) and Paul Francis Webster (lyrics), which was nominated for the 1962 Academy Award for Best Song. Robards won the 1962 NBR Award for his performances in Tender Is the Night and Long Day's Journey Into Night.
Seller: Raptis Rare Books, Palm Beach, FL, U.S.A.
FITZGERALD, F. SCOTT. Typed Letter Signed [TLS]. np, Baltimore, MD, 1934.
Price: US$35000.00 + shipping
Condition: Very Good
Description: IMPORTANT AND REVEALING LETTER BY F. SCOTT FITZGERALD ON HIS LITERARY INFLUENCES AND GROWTH AS A WRITER. It is rare that we get to read first hand about a writer's influences, especially during the formative years, but in answer to a letter from the scholar Egbert S. Oliver, Fitzgerald - with his characteristic wit -offers us details about his early literary education. The letter, partially quoted in Matthew Bruccoli's definitive biography, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, reads in full: 1307 Park Avenue Baltimore, Maryland January 7, 1934 Mr. Egbert S. Oliver Willamette University Salem Oregon Dear Mr. Oliver: The first help I ever had in writing in my life was from my father who read an utterly imitative Sherlock Holmes story of mine and pretended to like it. But after that I received the most invaluable aid from Mr. C. N. B. Wheeler then headmaster of the St. Paul Academy now the St. Paul Country Day School in St. Paul, Minnesota. 2. From [a] Mr. Hume, then co-headmaster of the Newman School and now headmaster of the Canterbury School. 3. From Courtland Van Winkle in freshman year at Princeton - now professor of literature at Yale (he gave us the book of Job to read and I don't think any of our preceptorial group ever quite recovered from it.) After that comes a lapse. Most of the professors seemed to me old and uninspired, or perhaps it was just that I was getting under way in my own field. I think this answers your question. This is also my permission to make full use of it with or without my name. Sorry I am unable from circumstances of time and pressure to go into it further. Sincerely, [signed] F. Scott Fitzgerald Fitzgerald attended the St. Paul Academy from 1908 - 1911 (from the ages of 12 to 16) and Broccoli underscores the influence in particular of C.N.B. Wheeler on Fitzgerald, noting that he was the only one of his teachers who encouraged him to write. (Fitzgerald published his first work of fiction in the school newspaper.) Fitzgerald's note that after Courtland Van Winkle in his freshman year at Princeton he "was getting under way in my own field" was certainly true, for it was shortly after his class with Van Winkle that Fitzgerald began work on what would become his sparkling debut novel, This Side of Paradise. The "circumstances of time and pressure" Fitzgerald mentions at the end of the letter were very real. This letter was written in January 1934 just as Tender is the Night was beginning to appear serially in Scribner's Magazine, and then in book form on April 12, 1934. The letters surrounding the Oliver letter in Fitzgerald's collected letters are frantic letters to his editor Max Perkins working out details for the first edition of Tender is the Night. The recipient, Egbert S. Oliver, was a prominent scholar of American literature. He was Professor of American Literature at Willamette University and Portland State University and wrote numerous books on American literature and American life. The Egbert S. Oliver papers now reside at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University. Provenance: Listed in F. Scott Fitzgerald in the Marketplace (Bruccoli and Baughman, 2009, p.31) as having been sold at Charles Hamilton Auction, 14 September, 1972. Typed letter signed with two hand-corrections in ink. Baltimore, Maryland, 1934. Two pages, 8.5'' x 11'' each; attractively matted and framed alongside a photo of Fitzgerald to an overall size of 32'' x 17.5''. Usual folds, paperclip imprint at top left of first page; otherwise fine. References: -Matthew J. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981. - Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed. F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Life in Letters, Scribner, 2010. (Published in full). -Matthew J. Bruccoli and Judith S. Baughman, editors. F. Scott Fitzgerald in the Marketplace, University of South Carolina Press, 2009.
Seller: Manhattan Rare Book Company, ABAA, ILAB, New York, NY, U.S.A.
Price: US$62000.00 + shipping
Description: First edition of the work which Fitzgerald considered to be his finest. Octavo, original green cloth. Presentation copy, lengthily inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, "For the unknown, unmet parents of Clare (note: double underlined). Knowing her, I hope you will find something to like in this present. Best wishes, F. Scott Fitzgerald." A very good example with some wear to the crown and foot of the spine, extremities of the cloth in a very good unrestored first issue dust jacket that has some rubbing and wear. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell and chemise case. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in a friend's copy of Tender Is the Night, "If you liked The Great Gatsby, for God's sake read this. Gatsby was a tour de force but this is a confession of faith." Set in the South of France in the decade after World War I, 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. Tender Is the Night 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. F. Scott Fitzgerald literally put his soul into Tender Is the Night, and the novel's lack of commercial success upon its initial publication in 1934 shattered him. He would die six years later without having published another novel, and without knowing that Tender Is the Night would come to be seen as perhaps his masterpiece. In Mabel Dodge Luhan's words, it raised him to the heights of "a modern Orpheus." Named by Modern Library as one of the 100 greatest novels of the twentieth century. It was basis for the 1962 film directed by Henry King starring Jennifer Jones and Jason Robards. The soundtrack featured a song, also called Tender Is the Night, by Sammy Fain (music) and Paul Francis Webster (lyrics), which was nominated for the 1962 Academy Award for Best Song. Robards won the 1962 NBR Award for his performances in Tender Is the Night and Long Day's Journey Into Night.
Seller: Raptis Rare Books, Palm Beach, FL, U.S.A.