Fitzgerald, F. Scott | “With the gratitude + best wishes of the author” — First edition of Tender Is the Night, inscribed to his nurse

Fitzgerald, F. Scott

Tender Is the Night: A Romance. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934

8vo. Publisher’s dark blue-green cloth, spine lettered in gilt; boards rubbed with light mottling and a couple of stains to front cover, extremities worn.

First edition, inscribed across the title-page “For Carma Freeman with the gratitude + best wishes of the author | F. Scott Fitzgerald | Marburg 1934.”

A significant presentation copy of Fitzgerald’s last completed novel, gifted to the nurse who attended him during his convalescence at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1934. Tender is the Night was completed that year to lukewarm sales and a few good reviews.

Carma Kaufman Freeman, a Johns Hopkins–trained nurse married to Dr. George Freeman, formed part of Fitzgerald’s small circle of steadying figures during his Baltimore crisis. Her professionalism and kindness left a strong impression on him, and the pieces he inscribed for her were the gifts of a man acutely aware of his own fragility. This Tender Is the Night, probably inscribed in the Marburg Building, the central domed structure of Johns Hopkins Hospital, represents the most formal and straightforward of his gifts to her, in contrast to the warmth of the inscription in her copy of This Side of Paradise (lot 1056) and the intimacy of the manuscript poem (see lot 1058). Indeed, the phrasing here: “with the gratitude + best wishes of the author,” is decidedly earnest.

REFERENCES:

Bruccoli, Matthew J., Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002; Daniel, Anne Margaret. "Medical advances: How F. Scott Fitzgerald's nurse inspired a fictional romance." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6224, 15 July 2022, p. 13

PROVENANCE:

Carma Kaufman Freeman; thence by descent