The Tragic Power: Selected Short Stories and Tender is the Night (1934)

‘His information, to be sure, on the general history of this American phase is remarkable. His most trivial stories have a substantial substratum of information. It should yield more and more revealing, penetrating pictures of American life as he settles gravely down in the twilight of the thirties’ (Mosher 80). Writing for The New Yorker in 1926, John Chapin Mosher’s prediction as to the likely paths to be taken by Scott Fitzgerald’s career were to prove remarkably accurate. The twilight years of the twenties were darkened progressively by Zelda Fitzgerald’s decline into insanity. Her admission to the Malmaison clinic outside Paris in April 1930, only the first of a series of clinics that would give her some temporary respite in the years ahead, marked almost ten years exactly since the date of her marriage to Scott. Among his ‘ten most beautiful words in the English language’ he told a reporter in 1932, were ‘snap, wine, dark and ineluctable’ (“Cellar Door?” in Conversations 106).