Published in 1934, <I>Tender Is the Night</I> was one of the most talked-about books of the year. "It's amazing how <I>excellent</I> much of it is," Ernest Hemingway said to Maxwell Perkins. "I will say now," John O'Hara wrote Fitzgerald, <I>"Tender Is the Night</I> is in the early stages of being my favorite book, even more than <I>This Side of Paradise."</I> And Archibald MacLeish exclaimed: "Great God, Scott...You are a fine writer. Believe it -- not me."<P>Set on the French Riviera in the late 1920s, <I>Tender Is the Night</I> is the tragic romance of the young actress Rosemary Hoyt and the stylish American couple Dick and Nicole Diver. A brilliant young psychiatrist at the time of his marriage, Dick is both husband and doctor to Nicole, whose wealth goads him into a lifestyle not his own, and whose growing strength highlights Dick's harrowing demise. A profound study of the romantic concept of character -- lyrical, expansive, and hauntingly evocative -- <I>Tender Is the Night,</I> Mabel Dodge Luhan remarked, raised F. Scott Fitzgerald to the heights of "a modern Orpheus."