his parents; his marriage to Zelda and her ingravescent mental illness; his infatuation with actress Lois Moran, and Zelda's affair with the French aviator Edouard Jozan. Fitzgerald completed the work in Fall 1933, and Scribner's Magazine serialized the novel in four installments between January and April 1934 before its publication on April 12, 1934. Although artist Edward Shenton illustrated the serialization, he did not design the book's jacket. The jacket was by an unknown artist, and Fitzgerald disliked it. The title is taken from the poem "Ode to a Nightingale" by John Keats. Critical reception Fitzgerald deemed the novel to be his masterwork and believed it would eclipse the acclaim of his previous works. It was instead met with lukewarm sales and mixed reviews. One book review in The New York Times by critic J. Donald Adams was particularly harsh: In contrast to the negative review in The New York Times, critic Burke Van Allen hailed the novel as a masterpiece in a April 1934 review in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle: Three months after its publication, Tender Is the Night had sold only 12,000 copies compared to This Side of Paradise which sold over 50,000 copies. Despite a number of positive reviews, a consensus emerged that the novel's Jazz Age setting and subject matter were both outdated and uninteresting to readers. The unexpected failure of the novel puzzled Fitzgerald for the remainder of his life. Various hypotheses have arisen as to why the novel did not receive a warmer reception upon release. Fitzgerald's friend, author Ernest Hemingway, opined that critics had initially only been interested in dissecting its weaknesses, rather than giving due credit to its merits. He argued that such overly harsh criticism stemmed from superficial readings of the material and Depression-era America's reaction to Fitzgerald's status as a symbol of Jazz Age excess. In his later years, Hemingway re-read the work and remarked that, in retrospect, "Tender Is the Night gets better and better". Posthumous reevaluation Following Fitzgerald's death in 1940, Tender Is the Nights critical reputation has steadily grown. Later critics have described it as "an exquisitely crafted piece of fiction" and "one of the greatest American novels". It is now widely regarded as among Fitzgerald's most accomplished works, with some agreeing with the author's assessment that it surpasses The Great Gatsby. Several critics have interpreted the novel to be a feminist work and posited that the