Auction Name: 2025 December 15 Rare Books Signature® Auction

Lot Number: 45205

Shortcut to Lot: HA.com/6323*45205

F. Scott Fitzgerald. Tender is the Night. A Romance. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1934.

8vo. Publisher's green cloth gilt; original color pictorial dust jacket; clamshell.

FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING with the Scribner "A" and Scribner seal on copyright page. PRESENTATION COPY, INSCRIBED BY THE AUTHOR on the front free endpaper: "Dear Curtis - you've been so appreciative of my books in the past that I thought this might amuse you - Scott Fitzgerald."

The inscription to "Curtis" is almost certainly to Kent Curtis (1890-1957), American novelist, World War I aviator, and member of the "Lost Generation." Curtis lived in Paris intermittently during the 1920s, where he and Fitzgerald became friends. The University of Virginia holds four letters from Fitzgerald to Curtis (1925-1928), which reference their friendship in Paris and include Fitzgerald's praise for Curtis's novels. Curtis authored adventure stories for boys, notably The Blushing Camel (1922) and The Tired Captains (1927). A superb "Lost Generation" and literary association.

Condition: Soiling to cloth; light edgewear; newspaper clipping, bookseller's label, and bookseller's stamp to front pastedown with light offsetting to inscription; small staple holes to free endpaper, not affecting inscription; small ticket to rear free endpaper recto with light staining to verso. Dust jacket unclipped (priced "$2.50"); restorations to jacket edges on verso, including spine panel ends and flap folds; a few old tape repairs; color correction to spine panel ends; front flap beginning to separate at fold, but holding; jacket lightly toned; a few chips and short tears. Still, a bright example of this rare jacket.

References: Bruccoli A14.1.a; Connolly, The Modern Movement, 79 ("The break-down of a marriage... is described with flashes of genius...").

Provenance: Kent "Curtis" (presentation inscription); Sotheby's 25 February 1976, lot 63; Christie's 02 December 2005, lot 165.

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