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Zelda Fitzgerald

December 20, 2023

Zelda Fitzgerald (née Sayre; July 24, 1900 – March 10, 1948) was an American novelist, painter, playwright, and socialite.[1] Born in Montgomery, Alabama, to a wealthy Southern family, she became locally famous for her beauty and high spirits.[1] In 1920, she married writer F. Scott Fitzgerald after the popular success of his debut novel, This Side of Paradise. The novel catapulted the young couple into the public eye, and she became known in the national press as the first American flapper.[2] Due to their wild antics and incessant partying, she and her husband became regarded in the newspapers as the enfants terribles of the Jazz Age.[3][4] Alleged infidelity and bitter recriminations soon undermined their marriage. After traveling abroad to Europe, Zelda's mental health deteriorated, and she had suicidal and homicidal tendencies which required psychiatric care.[a][6][7] Her doctors diagnosed Zelda with schizophrenia,[8][9] although later posthumous diagnoses posit bipolar disorder.[10]

Zelda Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald in February 1920
BornZelda Sayre
(1900-07-24)July 24, 1900
Montgomery, Alabama, U.S.
DiedMarch 10, 1948(1948-03-10) (aged 47)
Asheville, North Carolina, U.S.
Occupation
  • Novelist
  • short story writer
  • playwright
  • painter
  • socialite
Period1920–1948
Spouse
​
​
(m. 1920; died 1940)​
ChildrenFrances Scott Fitzgerald
Signature

While institutionalized at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, she authored the 1932 novel Save Me the Waltz, a semi-autobiographical account of her early life in the American South during the Jim Crow era and her marriage to F. Scott Fitzgerald.[11] Upon its publication by Scribner's, the novel garnered mostly negative reviews and experienced poor sales.[11] The critical and commercial failure of Save Me the Waltz disappointed Zelda and led her to pursue her other interests as a playwright and a painter.[12] In Fall 1932, she completed a stage play titled Scandalabra,[13] but Broadway producers unanimously declined to produce the play.[12] Disheartened, Zelda next attempted to paint watercolors but, when her husband arranged their exhibition in 1934, the critical response proved equally disappointing.[12][14]

While the two lived apart, Scott died of occlusive coronary arteriosclerosis in December 1940.[15] After her husband's death, she attempted to write a second novel Caesar's Things, but her recurrent voluntary institutionalization for mental illness interrupted her writing, and she failed to complete the work.[16] By this time, she had endured over ten years of electroshock therapy and insulin shock treatments,[17][18] and she suffered from severe memory loss.[19] In March 1948, while sedated and locked in a room on the fifth floor of Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, she died in a fire.[16][20] Her body was identified by her dental records and one of her slippers.[21] A follow-up investigation raised the possibility that the fire had been a work of arson by a disgruntled or mentally disturbed hospital employee.[22][20]

A 1970 biography by Nancy Milford was a finalist for the National Book Award.[23] After the success of Milford's biography, scholars viewed Zelda's artistic output in a new light.[24] Her novel Save Me the Waltz became the focus of literary studies exploring different facets of the work: how her novel contrasted with Scott's depiction of their marriage in Tender Is the Night,[25] and how 1920s consumer culture placed mental stress on modern women.[26] Concurrently, renewed interest began in Zelda's artwork, and her paintings were posthumously exhibited in the United States and Europe.[27] In 1992, she was inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame.[28]

Early life and family background edit

 
 
Zelda Fitzgerald in a 1918 photo from her high school yearbook (left) and at 19 years old in a dance costume (right)

Born in Montgomery, Alabama, on July 24, 1900, Zelda Sayre was the youngest of six children.[1] Her parents were Episcopalians.[29] Her mother, Minerva Buckner "Minnie" Machen, named her daughter after the gypsy heroine in a novel, presumably Jane Howard's "Zelda: A Tale of the Massachusetts Colony" (1866) or Robert Edward Francillon's "Zelda's Fortune" (1874).[30] Zelda was a spoiled child; her mother doted upon her daughter's every whim, but her father, Alabama politician Anthony Dickinson Sayre was a strict and remote man whom Zelda described as a "living fortress".[31][30] Sayre was a state legislator in the post-Reconstruction era who authored the landmark 1893 Sayre Act which disenfranchised black Alabamians for seventy years and ushered in the racially segregated Jim Crow period in the state.[32][33] There is scholarly speculation regarding whether Anthony Sayre sexually abused Zelda as a child based on later writings,[34][35] but there is no evidence confirming that Zelda was a victim of incest.[36]

At the time of Zelda's birth, her family was a prominent and influential Southern clan who had been slave-holders before the Civil War.[37][38][39] According to biographer Nancy Milford, "if there was a Confederate establishment in the Deep South, Zelda Sayre came from the heart of it".[40] Zelda's maternal grandfather was Willis Benson Machen, a Confederate Senator and later an U.S. Senator from Kentucky.[40] Her father's uncle was John Tyler Morgan,[41] a Confederate general and the second Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama.[42][43] An outspoken advocate of lynching who served six terms in the United States Senate, Morgan played a key role in laying the foundation for the Jim Crow era in the American South.[44] In addition to wielding considerable influence in national politics, Zelda's extended family owned the First White House of the Confederacy.[45][38] According to biographer Sally Cline, "in Zelda's girlhood, ghosts of the late Confederacy drifted through the sleepy oak-lined streets,"[46] and Zelda claimed that she drew her strength from Montgomery's Confederate past.[46]

During her idle youth in Montgomery, Zelda's affluent Southern family employed half-a-dozen domestic servants, many of whom were African-American.[45] Consequently, Zelda was unaccustomed to domestic labor or responsibilities of any kind.[47][48] As the privileged child of wealthy parents,[1] she danced, took ballet lessons, and enjoyed the outdoors.[49] In her youth, the family spent summers in Saluda, North Carolina, a village that would appear in her artwork decades later.[50] In 1914, Zelda began attending Sidney Lanier High School.[1] She was bright, but uninterested in her lessons. During high school, she continued her interest in ballet. She also drank gin, smoked cigarettes, and spent much of her time flirting with boys.[51] A newspaper article about one of her dance performances quoted her as saying that she cared only about "boys and swimming".[51]

She developed an appetite for attention, actively seeking to flout convention—whether by dancing or by wearing a tight, flesh-colored bathing suit to fuel rumors that she swam nude.[51] Her father's reputation was something of a safety net, preventing her social ruin.[49] As Southern women of the time were expected to be delicate and docile, Zelda's antics shocked the local community, and she became—along with her childhood friend and future Hollywood star Tallulah Bankhead—a mainstay of Montgomery gossip.[52] Her ethos was encapsulated beneath her high-school graduation photo: "Why should all life be work, when we all can borrow? Let's think only of today, and not worry about tomorrow."[53] Upon her graduation from high school, she was voted the "prettiest" and "most attractive" in her graduating class.[1]

Courtship by F. Scott Fitzgerald edit

Main article: F. Scott Fitzgerald
 
F. Scott Fitzgerald photographed in 1917, a few months before meeting Zelda in Montgomery

In July 1918, Zelda Sayre first met aspiring novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald at the Montgomery Country Club.[1] At the time, Fitzgerald had been freshly rejected by his first love, Chicago socialite and heiress Ginevra King, due to his lack of financial prospects.[54] Heartbroken by this rejection, Scott had dropped out of Princeton University and volunteered for the United States Army amid World War I.[55][56] While awaiting deployment to the Western front,[56] he was stationed at Camp Sheridan, outside Montgomery.[57]

While writing Ginevra King and begging her to resume their relationship,[58] a lonely Fitzgerald began courting Zelda and other young Montgomery women.[58] Scott called Zelda daily, and he visited Montgomery on his free days.[59] He often spoke of his ambition to become a famous novelist, and he sent her a chapter of a book he was writing.[59] At the time, Zelda dismissed Fitzgerald's remarks as mere boastfulness, and she concluded that he would never become a famous writer.[60] Infatuated with Zelda, Scott redrafted the character of Rosalind Connage in his unpublished manuscript The Romantic Egotist to resemble her,[61] and he told Zelda that "the heroine does resemble you in more ways than four."[62]

In addition to inspiring the character of Rosalind Connage, Fitzgerald used a quote from Zelda's letters for a soliloquy by the narrator at the conclusion of The Romantic Egotist, later retitled and published as This Side of Paradise.[63] Specifically, Zelda had written Fitzgerald a letter eulogizing the Confederate dead who perished during the American Civil War: "I've spent today in the graveyard... Isn't it funny how, out of a row of Confederate soldiers, two or three will make you think of dead lovers and dead loves—when they're exactly like the others, even to the yellowish moss."[64] In the final pages of his novel, Fitzgerald altered Zelda's sentiments to refer to Union soldiers instead of Confederates.[65]

During the early months of their courtship, Zelda and Scott strolled through the Confederate Cemetery at Oakwood.[60][66] While walking past the headstones, Fitzgerald ostensibly failed to show sufficient reverence, and Zelda informed Fitzgerald that he would never understand how she felt about the Confederate dead.[67][66] Fitzgerald drew upon Zelda's intense feelings about the Confederacy and the Old South in his 1920 short story The Ice Palace about a Southern girl who becomes lost in an ice maze while visiting a northern town.[60]

 
While courting Zelda Sayre, F. Scott Fitzgerald continued to write Ginevra King and begged to resume their former relationship.

While dating Zelda and other women in Montgomery, Fitzgerald received a letter from Ginevra King informing him of her engagement to polo player William "Bill" Mitchell.[68] Three days after Ginevra King married Bill Mitchell on September 4, 1918, Scott professed his affections for Zelda.[69] In his ledger, Scott wrote that he had fallen in love on September 7, 1918.[1] His love for Zelda increased as time passed, and he wrote to his friend Isabelle Amorous: "I love her and that's the beginning and end of everything. You're still a Catholic, but Zelda's the only God I have left now."[70] Ultimately, Zelda fell in love as well.[59] Her biographer Nancy Milford wrote, "Scott had appealed to something in Zelda which no one before him had perceived: a romantic sense of self-importance which was kindred to his own."[59]

Their courtship was interrupted in October when he was summoned north. He expected to be sent to France, but he was instead assigned to Camp Mills, Long Island. While he was there, the Allied Powers signed an armistice with Imperial Germany. He then returned to the base near Montgomery.[71] Together again, Zelda and Scott now engaged in what he later described as sexual recklessness, and by December 1918, they had consummated their relationship.[72] Although this was the first time they were sexually intimate, both Zelda and Scott had other sexual partners prior to their first meeting and courtship.[73][74] Initially, Fitzgerald did not intend to marry Zelda,[75] but the couple gradually viewed themselves as informally engaged, although Zelda declined to marry him until he proved financially successful.[76][77]

On February 14, 1919, he was discharged from the military and went north to establish himself in New York City.[78] During this time, Zelda mistakenly feared she was pregnant.[79] Scott mailed her pills to induce an abortion, but Zelda refused to take them and replied in a letter: "I simply can't and won't take those awful pills... I'd rather have a whole family than sacrifice my self-respect... I'd feel like a damn whore if I took even one."[80][79] They wrote frequently, and by March 1920, Scott had sent Zelda his mother's ring, and the two had become engaged.[81] However, when Scott's attempts to become a published author faltered during the next four months, Zelda became convinced that he could not support her accustomed lifestyle, and she broke off the engagement during the Red Summer of 1919.[82][83] Having been rejected by both Zelda and Ginevra during the past year due to his lack of financial prospects, Scott suffered from intense despair,[84] and he carried a revolver daily while contemplating suicide.[85]

Soon after, in July 1919, Fitzgerald returned to St. Paul.[86] Having returned to his hometown as a failure, Fitzgerald became a social recluse and lived on the top floor of his parents' home at 599 Summit Avenue, on Cathedral Hill.[87] He decided to make one last attempt to become a novelist and to stake everything on the success of a book.[86] Abstaining from alcohol and parties,[87] he worked day and night to revise The Romantic Egotist as This Side of Paradise—an autobiographical account of his Princeton years and his romances with Ginevra, Zelda, and others.[88] At the time, Fitzgerald's feelings for Zelda were at an all-time low, and he remarked to a friend, "I wouldn't care if she died, but I couldn't stand to have anybody else marry her."[87]

Marriage and celebrity edit

 
After marrying in April 1920, Zelda became homesick for the Deep South. She and Scott embarked that summer on a road-trip to visit her family in Montgomery, Alabama.

By September 1919, Scott completed his first novel, This Side of Paradise, and editor Maxwell Perkins of Charles Scribner's Sons accepted the manuscript for publication.[89] Scott requested an accelerated release to renew Zelda's faith in him: "I have so many things dependent on its success—including of course a girl."[90] After Scott informed Zelda of his novel's upcoming publication, a shocked Zelda replied apologetically: "I hate to say this, but I don't think I had much confidence in you at first.... It's so nice to know you really can do things do—anything—and I love to feel that maybe I can help just a little."[60]

Zelda agreed to marry Scott once Scribner's published the novel;[79] in turn, Fitzgerald promised to bring her to New York with "all the iridescence of the beginning of the world."[91] Scribner's published This Side of Paradise on March 26, 1920, and Zelda arrived in New York on March 30. A few days later, on April 3, 1920, they married in a small ceremony at St. Patrick's Cathedral.[92]

At the time of their wedding, Fitzgerald later claimed neither he nor Zelda still loved each other,[93][94] and the early years of their marriage in New York City proved to be a disappointment.[95][96][97] According to biographer Andrew Turnbull, "victory was sweet, though not as sweet as it would have been six months earlier before Zelda had rejected him. Fitzgerald couldn't recapture the thrill of their first love".[60] As the affections between Zelda and Scott cooled, her husband continued to obsess over the loss of his first love Ginevra King and, for the remainder of their marriage, Scott could not think of Ginevra "without tears coming to his eyes".[98][99]

Despite the cooling of their affections, Scott and Zelda quickly became celebrities of New York, as much for their wild behavior as for the success of This Side of Paradise. They were ordered to leave both the Biltmore Hotel and the Commodore Hotel for disturbing other guests.[97] Their daily lives consisted of outrageous pranks and drunken escapades.[100] While fully dressed, they jumped into the water fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel in New York.[100] They frequently hired taxicabs and rode on the hood.[100] One evening, while inebriated, they decided to visit the county morgue where they inspected the unidentified corpses and, on another evening, Zelda insisted on sleeping in a dog kennel.[101] Alcohol increasingly fueled their nightly escapades. Publicly, this meant little more than napping when they arrived at parties, but privately it increasingly led to bitter arguments.[102] To their mutual delight, New York newspapers depicted Zelda and Scott as cautionary examples of youth and excess—the enfants terribles of the hedonistic Jazz Age.[3][4]

 
 
Zelda and Scott at the beach in Westport, Connecticut, circa March 1922 (left), and a profile sketch of Zelda by artist Gordan Bryant published in Metropolitan Magazine in June 1922 (right)

After a month of hotel evictions,[97] the Fitzgeralds moved to a cottage in Westport, Connecticut, where Scott worked on drafts of his second novel.[103] Due to her privileged upbringing with many African-American servants, Zelda could not perform household responsibilities at Westport.[104] During the early months of their marriage, Scott's unwashed clothes began disappearing.[105] One day, he opened a closet and discovered his dirty clothes piled to the ceiling.[105] Uncertain of what to do with unwashed clothes, Zelda had never sent them out for cleaning: she had simply tossed everything into the closet.[105]

Soon after, Scott employed two maids and a laundress.[106] Zelda's complete dependence upon servants became the comedic focus of magazine articles.[107] When Harper & Brothers asked Zelda to contribute her favorite recipes in an article, she wrote: "See if there is any bacon, and if there is, ask the cook which pan to fry it in. Then ask if there are any eggs, and if so try and persuade the cook to poach two of them. It is better not to attempt toast, as it burns very easily. Also, in the case of bacon, do not turn the fire too high, or you will have to get out of the house for a week. Serve preferably on china plates, though gold or wood will do if handy."[107]

While Scott attempted to write his next novel at their home in Westport, Zelda announced that she was homesick for the Deep South.[108] In particular, she missed eating Southern cuisine such as peaches and biscuits for breakfast.[108] She suggested that they travel to Montgomery, Alabama.[108] On July 15, 1920, the couple traveled in a touring car—which Scott derogatorily nicknamed "the rolling junk"—to her parents' home in Montgomery.[108] After visiting Zelda's family for several weeks, they abandoned the unreliable vehicle and returned via train to Westport, Connecticut.[108] Zelda's parents visited their Westport cottage soon after, but her father Judge Anthony Sayre took a dim view of the couples' constant partying and scandalous lifestyle.[108] Following this visit, the Fitzgeralds relocated to an apartment at 38 West 59th Street in New York City.[108]

Pregnancy and Scottie edit

 
 
The cover (left) of The Beautiful and Damned with the characters of Anthony and Gloria drawn by W. E. Hill to resemble Scott and Zelda juxtaposed with a sketch (right) by Zelda in which she envisioned the dust-jacket for the novel. Ultimately, the publisher used W.E. Hill's work for the dust-jacket.

In February 1921, while Scott labored on drafts of his inchoate second novel The Beautiful and Damned, Zelda discovered she was pregnant.[109] She requested that the child be born on Southern soil in Alabama, but Fitzgerald adamantly refused.[110] Zelda wrote despondently to a friend: "Scott's changed... He used... to say he loved the South, but now he wants to get as far away from it as he can."[110] To Zelda's chagrin, her husband insisted upon having the baby at his northern home in Saint Paul, Minnesota.[111] On October 26, 1921, she gave birth to Frances "Scottie" Fitzgerald. As she emerged from the anesthesia, Scott recorded Zelda saying, "Oh, God, goofo I'm drunk. Mark Twain. Isn't she smart—she has the hiccups. I hope it's beautiful and a fool—a beautiful little fool."[112] Many of her words found their way into Scott's novels: in The Great Gatsby, the character Daisy Buchanan expresses a similar hope for her daughter.[113]

While writing The Beautiful and Damned, Scott drew upon "bits and pieces" of Zelda's diary and letters.[b][115] He modeled the characters of Anthony Patch on himself and Gloria Patch on—in his words—the chill-mindedness and selfishness of Zelda.[116] Prior to publication, Zelda proofread the drafts, and she urged her husband to cut the cerebral ending which focused on the main characters' lost idealism.[115] Upon its publication, Burton Rascoe, the newly appointed literary editor of the New York Tribune, approached Zelda for an opportunity to entice readers with a satirical review of Scott's latest work as a publicity stunt.[117]

Although Zelda had carefully proofread drafts of the novel,[115] she pretended in her review to read the novel for the very first time, and she wrote partly in jest that "on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine... and, also, scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald—I believe that is how he spells his name—seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home."[118][119] In the same review, Zelda joked that she hoped her husband's novel would become a commercial success as "there is the cutest cloth of gold dress for only $300 in a store on Forty-second Street".[118]

 
In Spring 1924, Zelda was detained by the New York Police Department on suspicion of being the infamous "Bobbed Haired Bandit," later identified as Celia Cooney (pictured). Soon after, Zelda and her husband departed New York for Europe.

The satirical review led to Zelda receiving offers from other magazines to write stories and articles. According to their daughter, Scott "spent many hours editing the short stories she sold to College Humor and to Scribner's Magazine".[120] In June 1922, Metropolitan Magazine published an essay by Zelda Fitzgerald titled "Eulogy on the Flapper".[121] At the time flappers were typically young, modern women who bobbed their hair and wore short skirts.[122][123] They also drank alcohol and had premarital sex.[124][125] Though ostensibly a piece about the decline of the flapper lifestyle after its heyday in the early 1920s, Zelda's biographer Nancy Milford wrote that Zelda's essay served as "a defense of her own code of existence."[126] In the article, Zelda described the ephemeral phenomenon of the flapper:

The Flapper awoke from her lethargy of sub-deb-ism, bobbed her hair, put on her choicest pair of earrings and a great deal of audacity and rouge and went into the battle. She flirted because it was fun to flirt and wore a one-piece bathing suit because she had a good figure ... she was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do. Mothers disapproved of their sons taking the Flapper to dances, to teas, to swim and most of all to heart.[126]

After the publication of The Beautiful and Damned in March 1922, the Fitzgeralds traveled to either New York or St. Paul in order for Zelda to procure an abortion.[127] Ultimately, Zelda would have three abortions during their marriage, and her sister Rosalind later questioned whether Zelda's later mental deterioration was due to health side-effects of these unsafe procedures.[128] Zelda's thoughts on terminating her second pregnancy are unknown, but in the first draft of The Beautiful and Damned, Scott wrote a scene in which Gloria Gilbert believes she is pregnant and Anthony Patch suggests she "talk to some woman and find out what's best to be done. Most of them fix it some way."[129] Anthony's suggestion was removed from the final version, and this significant alteration shifted the focus from a moral dilemma about the act of abortion to Gloria's superficial concern that a baby would ruin her figure.[129]

Following the financial failure of Scott's play The Vegetable,[130] the Fitzgeralds found themselves mired in debt. Although Scott wrote short stories furiously to pay the bills, he became burned out and depressed.[131] During this period, while Scott wrote short stories at home, the New York Police Department detained Zelda near the Queensboro Bridge on the suspicion of her being the "Bobbed Haired Bandit," an infamous spree-robber later identified as Celia Cooney.[132] Following this incident, the couple departed in April 1924 for Paris, France, in the hope of living a more frugal existence abroad in Europe.[133]

Expatriation to Europe edit

 
Zelda, Scott, and their daughter Scottie pictured in their passport book for their trip to Europe in 1924.

After arriving in Paris, the couple soon relocated to Antibes on the French Riviera.[134] While Scott labored on drafts of The Great Gatsby, Zelda became infatuated with a French naval aviator, Edouard Jozan.[135] The exact details of the supposed romance are unverifiable and contradictory,[136][137] and Jozan himself claimed the Fitzgeralds invented the entire incident.[138] According to conflicting accounts, Zelda spent afternoons swimming at the beach and evenings dancing at the casinos with Jozan. After several weeks, she asked Scott for a divorce.[139] Scott purportedly challenged Jozan to duel and locked Zelda in their villa until he could kill him.[140] Before any fatal confrontation could occur, Jozan—who had no intention of marrying Zelda—fled the Riviera, and the Fitzgeralds never saw him again.[139] Soon after, Zelda possibly overdosed on sleeping pills.[7]

On his part, Jozan dismissed the entire story as pure fabrication and claimed no romance with Zelda had ever occurred: "They both had a need of drama, they made it up and perhaps they were the victims of their own unsettled and a little unhealthy imagination."[138][141] In later retellings, both Zelda and Scott embellished the story, and Zelda later falsely told Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley Richardson that the affair ended when Jozan committed suicide.[142] In fact, Jozan had been transferred by the French military to Indochina.[143]

Regardless of whether any extramarital affair with Jozan occurred,[144] the episode led to a breach of trust in their marriage,[145] and Fitzgerald wrote in his notebook, "I knew something had happened that could never be repaired."[136] The incident likely influenced Fitzgerald's writing of The Great Gatsby, and he drew upon many elements of his tempestuous relationship with Zelda, including the loss of certainty in her love.[143] In August, he wrote to his friend Ludlow Fowler: "I feel old too, this summer ... the whole burden of this novel—the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world that you don't care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory."[143]

Scott finalized The Great Gatsby in October 1924.[133] The couple attempted to celebrate with travel to Rome and Capri, but both were unhappy and unhealthy. When he received the galleys for his novel, Scott fretted over the best title: Trimalchio in West Egg, just Trimalchio or Gatsby, Gold-hatted Gatsby, or The High-bouncing Lover. Disliking Fitzgerald's chosen title of Trimalchio in West Egg, editor Max Perkins persuaded him that the reference was too obscure and that people would be unable to pronounce it.[146] After both Zelda and Perkins expressed their preference for The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald agreed.[147] It was also on this trip, while ill with colitis, that Zelda began painting artworks.[148]

Meeting Ernest Hemingway edit

 
Writer Ernest Hemingway in 1923, two years before he met Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald in Paris, France.

Returning to Paris in April 1925, Zelda met Ernest Hemingway, whose career her husband did much to promote. Through Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds were introduced to Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Robert McAlmon, and others.[136] Scott and Hemingway became close friends, but Zelda and Hemingway disliked each other from their first meeting. She openly referred to him with homophobic slurs and denounced him as a "fairy with hair on his chest".[149] She considered Hemingway's domineering macho persona to be merely a posture to conceal his homosexuality; in turn, Hemingway told Scott that Zelda was "insane".[150] In his memoir A Moveable Feast, Hemingway claims he realized that Zelda had a mental illness when she insisted that jazz singer Al Jolson was greater than Jesus Christ.[151] Hemingway alleged that Zelda sought to destroy her husband, and she purportedly taunted Fitzgerald over his penis' size.[152] After examining it in a public restroom, Hemingway confirmed Fitzgerald's penis to be of average size.[152]

Hemingway claimed that Zelda urged her husband to write lucrative short stories as opposed to novels in order to support her accustomed lifestyle.[153][154] To supplement their income, Fitzgerald often wrote stories for magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's Weekly, and Esquire.[155] "I always felt a story in The Post was tops", Zelda later recalled, "But Scott couldn't stand to write them. He was completely cerebral, you know. All mind."[156] Scott would write his stories in an 'authentic' manner, then rewrite them to add plot twists which increased their salability as magazine stories.[157] This "whoring" for Zelda—as Hemingway dubbed these sales—emerged as a sore point in their friendship.[157] After reading The Great Gatsby, Hemingway vowed to put any differences with Fitzgerald aside and to aid him in any way he could, although he feared Zelda would derail Fitzgerald's career.[158] In a letter to Fitzgerald, Hemingway warned him that Zelda would derail his career:

Of all people on earth you needed discipline in your work and instead you marry someone who is jealous of your work, wants to compete with you and ruins you. It's not as simple as that and I thought Zelda was crazy the first time I met her and you complicated it even more by being in love with her and, of course, you're a rummy.[159]

 
Scott's attentions to dancer Isadora Duncan at a party caused Zelda to throw herself down a flight of marble stairs.

A more serious rift in the Fitzgerald's marriage occurred when Zelda suspected that Scott was closeted homosexual,[160] and she alleged that Fitzgerald and Hemingway engaged in homosexual relations.[161][162] In the ensuing months, she frequently belittled Scott with homophobic slurs during their public excursions.[163] Biographer Matthew J. Bruccoli posits that Zelda's inordinate preoccupation with other persons' sexual behavior likely indicated the onset of her paranoid schizophrenia.[164] However, Fitzgerald's sexuality was a popular subject of debate among his friends and acquaintances.[165][166][167] As a youth, Fitzgerald had a close relationship with Father Sigourney Fay,[168] a possibly gay Catholic priest,[169][170] and Fitzgerald later used his last name for the idealized romantic character of Daisy Fay Buchanan.[171] After college, Fitzgerald cross-dressed during outings in Minnesota and flirted with men at social events.[172] While staying in Paris, rumors dogged Fitzgerald among the American expat community that he was gay.[166]

Irritated by Zelda's recurrent homophobic attacks on his sexual identity,[c] Scott decided to have sex with a Parisian prostitute.[164] Zelda found condoms that he had purchased before any sexual encounter occurred, and a bitter quarrel ensued, resulting in ingravescent jealousy.[174] Soon after, a jealous Zelda threw herself down a flight of marble stairs at a party because Fitzgerald, engrossed in talking to American dancer Isadora Duncan, ignored her.[175] In December 1926, after two unpleasant years in Europe which considerably strained their marriage, the Fitzgeralds returned to America, but their marital difficulties continued to fester.[176]

In January 1927, the Fitzgeralds relocated to Los Angeles where Scott wrote Lipstick for United Artists and met Hollywood starlet Lois Moran.[177] Jealous of Moran, Zelda set fire to her clothing in a bathtub as a self-destructive act.[178] She disparaged Moran as "a breakfast food that many men identified with whatever they missed from life."[179] Fitzgerald's relations with Moran exacerbated the Fitzgeralds' marital difficulties and, after merely two months in Hollywood, the unhappy couple relocated to Ellerslie in Wilmington, Delaware, in March 1927.[180][177] Literary critic Edmund Wilson, recalling a party at the Fitzgerald home in Edgemoor, Delaware, in February 1928, described Zelda as follows:

I sat next to Zelda, who was at her iridescent best. Some of Scott's friends were irritated; others were enchanted, by her. I was one of the ones who were charmed. She had the waywardness of a Southern belle and the lack of inhibitions of a child. She talked with so spontaneous a color and wit—almost exactly in the way she wrote—that I very soon ceased to be troubled by the fact that the conversation was in the nature of a 'free association' of ideas and one could never follow up anything. I have rarely known a woman who expressed herself so delightfully and so freshly: she had no ready-made phrases on the one hand and made no straining for effect on the other. It evaporated easily, however, and I remember only one thing she said that night: that the writing of Galsworthy was a shade of blue for which she did not care.[181]

Obsession and illness edit

 
Zelda's portrait for her French identity card circa 1929

By 1927 at the Ellersie estate in Wilmington, Delaware, Scott had become severely alcoholic, and Zelda's behavior became increasingly erratic.[182] Much of the conflict between them stemmed from the boredom and isolation Zelda experienced when Scott was writing.[182] She would often interrupt him when he was working, and the two grew increasingly miserable.[182] Stung by Fitzgerald's criticism that all great women use their talents constructively, Zelda had a deep desire to develop a talent that was entirely her own.[115]

At the age of 28, she became obsessed with Russian ballet, and she decided to embark upon a career as a prima ballerina.[101] Her friend Gerald Murphy counseled against their ambition and remarked that "there are limits to what a woman of Zelda's age can do and it was obvious that she had taken up the dance too late."[183] Despite being far too old to achieve such an ambition, Scott Fitzgerald paid for Zelda to begin practicing under the tutelage of Catherine Littlefield, director of the Philadelphia Opera Ballet.[115][184] After the Fitzgeralds returned to Europe in summer 1928, Scott paid for Zelda to study under Russian ballerina Lubov Egorova in Paris.[185]

In September 1929, the San Carlo Opera Ballet Company in Naples invited her to join their ballet school.[185] In preparation, Zelda undertook a grueling daily practice of up to eight hours a day,[186] and she "punished her body in strenuous efforts to improve."[115] According to Zelda's daughter, although Scott "greatly appreciated and encouraged his wife's unusual talents and ebullient imagination,"[120] he became alarmed when her "dancing became a twenty-four-hour preoccupation which was destroying her physical and mental health."[120] Soon after, Zelda collapsed from physical and mental exhaustion.[186] One evening, Scott returned home to find an exhausted Zelda seated on the floor and entranced with a pile of sand.[101] When he asked her what she was doing, she could not speak.[101] He summoned a French physician, who examined Zelda and informed him that "your wife is mad."[101]

 
Eugen Bleuler, one of Europe's leading psychiatrists, diagnosed Zelda as schizophrenic in November 1930.

Soon after her physical and mental collapse, Zelda's mental health further deteriorated.[187] In October 1929, during an automobile trip to Paris along the mountainous roads of the Grande Corniche, Zelda seized the car's steering wheel and tried to kill herself, her husband, and her nine-year-old daughter Scottie by driving over a cliff.[5] After this homicidal incident, Zelda sought psychiatric treatment. On April 23, 1930, the Malmaison Clinic near Paris admitted her for observation.[188] On May 22, 1930, she moved to Valmont sanatorium in Montreux, Switzerland.[189] The clinic primarily treated gastrointestinal ailments and, due to her profound psychological problems, she was moved again to a psychiatric facility in Prangins on the shores of Lake Geneva on June 5, 1930.[189] At Prangins in June, Dr. Oscar Forel issued a tentative diagnosis of schizophrenia,[8] but he feared her psychological condition might be far worse.[190] Zelda's biographer, Nancy Milford, quotes Dr. Forel's full diagnosis at length:

The more I saw Zelda, the more I thought at the time [that] she is neither [suffering from] a pure neurosis nor a real psychosis—I considered her a constitutional, emotionally unbalanced psychopath—she may improve, [but] never completely recover.[190]

After five months of observation, Doctor Eugen Bleuler—one of Europe's leading psychiatrists—confirmed Dr. Forel's diagnosis of Zelda as a schizophrenic on November 22, 1930.[9] (Following Zelda's death, later psychiatrists speculated that Zelda instead had bipolar disorder.[191]) She was released from Prangins in September 1931.[189] In an attempt to keep his wife out of an asylum, Scott hired nurses and attendants to care for Zelda at all times.[101] Although there were periods where her behavior was merely eccentric, she could frequently become a danger to herself and others.[101] In one instance, she attempted to throw herself in front of a moving train and, in another instance, she attacked a visiting guest at their home without provocation.[192] Despite her precarious mental health, the couple traveled to Montgomery, Alabama, where her father, Judge Anthony Sayre, lay dying. After her father's death, her mental health again deteriorated and she had another breakdown.[189]

Save Me the Waltz edit

Main article: Save Me the Waltz
 
Portrait of Zelda Fitzgerald by Harrison Fisher, 1927

In February 1932, after an episode of hysteria, Zelda insisted that she be readmitted to a mental hospital.[193] Over her husband's objections,[194] the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore admitted Zelda on February 12, 1932.[193] Dr. Adolf Meyer, an expert on schizophrenia, oversaw her treatment.[194] As part of her recovery routine, she spent at least two hours a day writing a manuscript.[195] At the Phipps Clinic, Zelda developed a bond with Dr. Mildred Squires, a female resident.[194] When Dr. Squires asked Scott to speculate why Zelda's mental health had deteriorated, Fitzgerald replied:

Perhaps fifty percent of our friends and relatives would tell you in all honest conviction that my drinking drove Zelda insane—the other half would assure you that her insanity drove me to drink. Neither judgement would mean anything.[189]

Toward the end of February 1932, Zelda shared fragments of her manuscript with Dr. Squires, who wrote to Scott that the unfinished novel was vivid and had charm.[196] Zelda wrote to Scott from the hospital, "I am proud of my novel, but I can hardly restrain myself enough to get it written. You will like it—It is distinctly École Fitzgerald, though more ecstatic than yours—perhaps too much so."[197] Zelda finished the novel on March 9. She sent the unaltered manuscript to Scott's editor, Maxwell Perkins, at Scribner's.[198]

Surprised to receive an unannounced novel in the mail from Zelda, Perkins carefully perused the manuscript.[198] He concluded the work had "a slightly deranged quality which gave him the impression that the author had difficulty in separating fiction from reality."[198] He felt the manuscript contained several good sections, but its overall tone seemed hopelessly "dated" and tonally resembled Fitzgerald's 1922 work The Beautiful and Damned.[198] Perkins hoped that her husband might be able to improve its overall quality with his criticism.[198]

Upon learning that Zelda had submitted her manuscript to Perkins, Scott became angry that she had not shown her manuscript to him beforehand.[199] After reading the manuscript, he objected to her novel's plagiarism of his protagonist in This Side of Paradise.[198] He was further upset to learn that Zelda's novel used the very same plot elements as his upcoming novel, Tender Is the Night.[200] After receiving letters from Scott delineating these objections, Zelda wrote to Scott apologetically that she was "afraid we might have touched the same material."[201]

 
Having met Zelda for lunch in April 1932, writer H. L. Mencken described her as exhibiting constant signs of mental distress and anguish.

Despite Scott's initial annoyance, a debt-ridden Fitzgerald realized that Zelda's book might earn a tidy profit.[202] Consequently, his requested revisions were "relatively few", and "the disagreement was quickly resolved, with Scott recommending the novel to Perkins."[200][203] Several weeks later, Scott wrote to Perkins: "Here is Zelda's novel. It is a good novel now, perhaps a very good novel—I am too close to tell. It has the faults and virtues of a first novel.... It should interest the many thousands in dancing. It is about something and absolutely new, and should sell."[204] Although unimpressed,[205] Perkins agreed to publish the work as a way for Fitzgerald to repay his financial debt to Scribner's.[206] Perkins arranged for half of Zelda's royalties to be applied against Scott's debt to Scribner's until at least $5,000 had been repaid.[206]

In March 1932, the Phipps Clinic discharged Zelda, and she joined her husband Scott and her daughter at the La Paix estate in Baltimore, Maryland.[207] Although discharged, she remained mentally unwell.[208] One month later, Fitzgerald took her to lunch with critic H. L. Mencken, the literary editor of The American Mercury.[208] In his diary, Mencken noted Zelda "went insane in Paris a year or so ago, and is still plainly more or less off her base."[208] Throughout the luncheon, she manifested signs of mental distress.[208] A year later, when Mencken met Zelda for the last time, he described her mental illness as immediately evident to any onlooker and her mind as "only half sane."[209] He regretted that F. Scott Fitzgerald could not write novels, as he had to write magazine stories to pay for Zelda's psychiatric treatment.[208]

On October 7, 1932, Scribner's published Save Me the Waltz with a printing of 3,010 copies—not unusually low for a first novel in the middle of the Great Depression—on cheap paper, with a cover of green linen.[210] According to Zelda, the book derived its title from a Victor record catalog,[211] and the title evoked the romantic glitter of the lifestyle which F. Scott Fitzgerald and herself experienced during the riotous Jazz Age. The parallels to the Fitzgeralds were obvious: The protagonist of the novel is Alabama Beggs—like Zelda, the daughter of a Southern judge—who marries David Knight, an aspiring painter who abruptly becomes famous for his work. They live the fast life in Connecticut before departing to live in France. Dissatisfied with her marriage, Alabama throws herself into ballet. Though told she has no chance, she perseveres and after three years becomes the lead dancer in an opera company. Alabama becomes ill from exhaustion, however, and the novel ends when they return to her family in the South, as her father is dying.[212]

A shooting star, an ectoplasmic arrow, sped through the nebulous hypothesis like a wanton hummingbird. From Venus to Mars to Neptune it trailed the ghost of comprehension, illuminating far horizons over the pale battlefields of reality.

—Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz (1932)[213]

Echoing Zelda's frustrations, the novel portrays Alabama's struggle to establish herself independently of her husband and to earn respect for her own accomplishments.[214] In contrast to Scott's unadorned prose, Zelda's writing style in Save Me the Waltz is replete with verbal flourishes and complex metaphors. The novel is also deeply sensual; as literary scholar Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin observed in 1979, "the sensuality arises from Alabama's awareness of the life surge within her, the consciousness of the body, the natural imagery through which not only emotions but simple facts are expressed, the overwhelming presence of the senses, in particular touch and smell, in every description."[215]

The reviews of Save Me the Waltz by literary critics were overwhelmingly negative.[11] The critics savaged Zelda's florid prose as overwritten, attacked her fictional characters as uninteresting, and mocked her tragic scenes as grotesquely "harlequinade".[216] The New York Times published a particularly harsh review and lambasted her editor Max Perkins: "It is not only that her publishers have not seen fit to curb an almost ludicrous lushness of writing but they have not given the book the elementary services of a literate proofreader."[216] The overwhelmingly negative reviews bewildered and distressed Zelda.[216]

Painting and later years edit

 
 
Two examples of Zelda's paintings. Her works such as Fifth Avenue (left), gouache on paper, and Still Life with Cyclamen (right), watercolor on paper, were exhibited in 1934.

From the mid-1930s onward, Zelda would be hospitalized sporadically for the rest of her life at sanatoriums in Baltimore, New York, and in Asheville, North Carolina.[189] When Scott visited Zelda in the sanatoriums, she increasingly exhibited signs of mental instability.[217] During one visit, Scott and friends took Zelda on an outing to a nearby home in Tryon, North Carolina.[217] During the lunch, she became withdrawn and ceased communication.[217] On the return drive to the sanatorium, she wrenched open the car door and threw herself out of the moving vehicle in an attempt to kill herself.[217] In another incident, Zelda's unexpected loss of a tennis match at the Asheville sanatorium resulted in her physically attacking her tennis partner and beating them over the head with her tennis racket.[217]

Despite the deterioration of her mental health, she continued pursuing her artistic ambitions. After the critical and commercial failure of Save Me the Waltz, she attempted to write a farcical stage play titled Scandalabra in Fall 1932.[12][189] However, after submitting the manuscript to agent Harold Ober, Broadway producers rejected her play.[13] Following this rejection, Scott arranged for her play Scandalabra to be staged by a Little Theater group in Baltimore, Maryland, and he sat through long hours of rehearsals of the play.[120] A year later, during a group therapy session with her husband and a psychiatrist, Fitzgerald remarked that she was "a third-rate writer and a third-rate ballet dancer."[218] Following this remark, Zelda attempted to paint watercolors while in and out of sanatoriums.[219]

In March 1934, Scott Fitzgerald arranged the first exhibition of Zelda's artwork—13 paintings and 15 drawings—in New York City.[14][220] As with the tepid reception of her book, New York critics were ill-disposed towards her paintings.[219] The New Yorker described them merely as "paintings by the almost mythical Zelda Fitzgerald; with whatever emotional overtones or associations may remain from the so-called Jazz Age." No actual description of the paintings was provided in the review.[221]

Following the critical failure of her artwork exhibition, Scott awoke one morning to discover Zelda had gone missing.[217] After the arrival of a doctor and several attendants, a manhunt ensued in New York City.[217] Ultimately, they found Zelda in Central Park digging a grave.[217] Soon after, she became even more violent and reclusive. In 1936, Scott placed her in the Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, writing to friends:[222]

Zelda now claims to be in direct contact with Christ, William the Conqueror, Mary Stuart, Apollo and all the stock paraphernalia of insane-asylum jokes ... For what she has really suffered, there is never a sober night that I do not pay a stark tribute of an hour to in the darkness. In an odd way, perhaps incredible to you, she was always my child (it was not reciprocal as it often is in marriages) ... I was her great reality, often the only liaison agent who could make the world tangible to her.[222]

Zelda remained in the hospital while Scott returned to Hollywood for a $1,000-a-week job with MGM in June 1937.[223] Estranged from Zelda, he attempted to reunite with his first love Ginevra King when she visited California in October 1938, but his uncontrolled alcoholism sabotaged their brief reunion.[224][225] When a disappointed King returned to Chicago, Fitzgerald settled into a clandestine relationship with Hollywood gossip columnist Sheilah Graham.[223] Throughout their relationship, Graham claimed Fitzgerald felt constant guilt over Zelda's mental illness and confinement.[226] He repeatedly attempted sobriety, had depression, had violent outbursts, and attempted suicide.[227]

For the next several years, a depressed Scott continued screenwriting on the West Coast and visiting a hospitalized Zelda on the East Coast. In April 1939, a coterie from Zelda's mental hospital had planned to go to Cuba, but Zelda had missed the trip. The Fitzgeralds decided to go on their own. The trip proved to be a disaster. During this trip, spectators at a cockfight beat F. Scott Fitzgerald when he tried to intervene against animal cruelty.[228] He returned to the United States so exhausted and intoxicated that he required hospitalization.[229] The Fitzgeralds never saw each other again.[230]

I am sorry that there should be nothing to greet you but an empty shell . . . I love you anyway . . . even if there isn't any me or any love or even any life . . . I love you.

—Zelda Fitzgerald, Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, December 1940[231]

Scott returned to Hollywood in order to pay the ever-increasing bills for Zelda's continued hospitalization. She made some progress in Asheville, and in March 1940, four years after admittance, she was discharged to her mother's care.[232] She was nearly forty now, her friends were long gone, and the Fitzgeralds no longer had much money. They wrote to each other frequently, and they made plans to meet again in December 1940. In a letter Zelda wrote to Fitzgerald shortly before he died of a heart attack, she said: "I am sorry that there should be nothing to greet you but an empty shell . . . I love you anyway . . . even if there isn't any me or any love or even any life . . . I love you."[231] Their planned rendezvous did not occur due to Scott's death of occlusive coronary arteriosclerosis at 44 years of age in December 1940. Due to her fragile mental health, Zelda could not attend his funeral in Rockville, Maryland.[233]

After Scott's death, Zelda read his unfinished manuscript titled The Love of the Last Tycoon. She wrote to his friend Edmund Wilson who agreed to edit the book and to eulogize his legacy. Zelda believed Scott's work contained "an American temperament grounded in belief in oneself and 'will-to-survive' that Scott's contemporaries had relinquished. Scott, she insisted, had not. His work possessed a vitality and stamina because of his indefatigable faith in himself."[233] After reading The Last Tycoon, Zelda began work on a new novel, Caesar's Things. As she had missed Scott's funeral due to her mental health, she likewise missed Scottie's wedding. By August 1943, she returned to the Highland Hospital. She worked on her novel while checking in and out of the hospital. She did not get better, and she did not finish the novel.[16]

Hospital fire and death edit

 
Zelda and Scott's current grave in Rockville, Maryland

Towards the end of her life, Zelda resided in and out of sanatoriums. Zelda checked back into the hospital in September 1946, and then she returned to live with her mother Minnie in their Alabama home.[156] By this point in her life, she had undergone over ten years of electroshock therapy and insulin shock treatments.[17][18] Consequently, she now "suffered from severe loss of memory and an apathetic personality due to constant shock therapies."[19]

Possibly due to these treatments or her deteriorated mental health, she espoused fascism as a political ideology.[234] According to biographer Nancy Milford, Zelda became "taken with the idea of fascism as a way of holding everything together, of ordering the masses."[234] When acquaintance Henry Dan Piper visited Zelda in March 1947, she declared that fascism served "to keep things from falling apart and to keep the finer things from being lost or extinguished."[234]

In November 1947, Zelda returned for the last time to Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina.[232] Due to insulin treatments her weight ballooned to 130 pounds.[235] Acquaintance Edna Garlington Spratt recalled Zelda's grim appearance in the final months before her death: "She was anything but pretty when I saw her. She acted normal, but she looked so dreadful. Her hair was stringy and she had lost all pride in herself."[20] Early in March 1948, her doctors told her she was better and she could leave, but she allegedly stayed for further treatment.[20]

On the night of March 10, 1948, a fire broke out in the hospital kitchen. Zelda had been sedated and locked in a room on the fifth floor, possibly awaiting shock therapy.[236][20] The fire moved through the dumbwaiter shaft, spreading onto every floor. The fire escapes were wooden, and they caught fire as well. Nine women, including Zelda, died.[16] She was identified by her dental records and, according to other reports, one of her slippers.[237] A follow-up investigation raised the unconfirmed possibility that the fire had been a work of arson by Willie Mae, a disgruntled or mentally disturbed hospital employee who had initiated the fire in the kitchen.[22][20]

Zelda and Scott were buried in Rockville, Maryland, originally in Rockville Cemetery, away from his family plot.[220] Only one photograph of the original gravesite is known to exist, taken in 1970 by Fitzgerald scholar Richard Anderson and published in 2016. At her daughter Scottie's request, Zelda and Scott were interred with the other Fitzgeralds at Saint Mary's Catholic Cemetery.[220] Inscribed on their tombstone is the final sentence of The Great Gatsby: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."[238]

Critical reappraisal edit

 
Self-portrait, watercolor, probably painted in the early 1940s

At the time of his third and fatal heart attack in December 1940, her husband Scott Fitzgerald died believing himself to be a failure as a writer.[239] Two years later, after the United States' entrance into World War II, an association of publishing executives created the Council on Books in Wartime which distributed 155,000 copies of The Great Gatsby to U.S. soldiers overseas,[240] and the book proved popular among beleaguered troops.[241] By 1944, a full-scale Fitzgerald revival had occurred.[242] Despite the renewed interest in Scott's oeuvre, Zelda's death in March 1948 was little noted in the press.

In 1950, acquaintance and screenwriter Budd Schulberg wrote The Disenchanted, with characters based recognizably on the Fitzgeralds who end up as forgotten former celebrities, he awash with alcohol and she befuddled by mental illness. It was followed in 1951 by Cornell University professor Arthur Mizener's The Far Side of Paradise, a biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald that rekindled interest in the couple among scholars. Mizener's biography was serialized in The Atlantic Monthly, and a story about the book appeared in Life magazine. Scott was depicted as a fascinating failure; Zelda's mental health was largely blamed for his lost potential.[243]

In 1970, however, the history of Zelda and Scott's marriage saw its most profound revision in a book by Nancy Milford, a graduate student at Columbia University. Zelda: A Biography, the first book-length treatment of Zelda's life, became a finalist for the National Book Award and figured for weeks on The New York Times best-seller list.[23] The book recast Zelda as an artist in her own right whose talents were belittled by a controlling husband. Zelda posthumously became an icon of the feminist movement in the 1970s—a woman whose unappreciated potential had been suppressed by patriarchal society.[244]

After the success of Milford's 1970 biography, scholars began to view Zelda's work in a new light.[24] Prior to Milford's biography, scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli had written in 1968 that Zelda's novel Save Me the Waltz was "worth reading partly because anything that illuminates the career of F. Scott Fitzgerald is worth reading—and because it is the only published novel of a brave and talented woman who is remembered for her defeats."[245] However, in the wake of Milford's biography, a new perspective emerged,[26] and scholar Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin wrote in 1979: "Save Me the Waltz is a moving and fascinating novel which should be read on its own terms equally as much as Tender Is the Night. It needs no other justification than its comparative excellence."[245] After Milford's 1970 biography, Save Me the Waltz became the focus of many literary studies that explored different aspects of her work: how the novel contrasted with Scott's depiction of their marriage in Tender Is the Night,[25] and how the consumer culture that emerged in the 1920s placed stress on modern women.[26]

 
Lauren Bloom as Zelda Fitzgerald and Lance Adell as F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Last Flapper, a 2006 dramatization of her life

In 1991, Zelda's collected writings including Save Me the Waltz were edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and published.[246] Reviewing the collection, The New York Times literary critic Michiko Kakutani wrote "that the novel was written in two months is amazing. That for all its flaws it still manages to charm, amuse and move the reader is even more remarkable. Zelda Fitzgerald succeeded, in this novel, in conveying her own heroic desperation to succeed at something of her own, and she also managed to distinguish herself as a writer with, as Edmund Wilson once said of her husband, a 'gift for turning language into something iridescent and surprising.'"[247]

In addition to a critical reappraisal of her novel, Zelda's artwork also has been reappraised as interesting in its own right. After spending much of the 1950s and 1960s in family attics—Zelda's mother even had much of the art burned because she disliked it—her work drew the renewed interest of scholars.[27] Posthumous exhibitions of her watercolors have toured the United States and Europe. A review of the exhibition by curator Everl Adair noted the influence of Vincent van Gogh and Georgia O'Keeffe on her paintings and concluded that her surviving corpus of art "represents the work of a talented, visionary woman who rose above tremendous odds to create a fascinating body of work—one that inspires us to celebrate the life that might have been."[27]

Scholars continue to debate the role that Zelda and Scott may have had in inspiring and stifling each other's creativity.[248] Biographer Sally Cline wrote that the two camps can be "as diametrically opposed as the Plath and Hughes literary camps"—a reference to the heated controversy about the relationship of husband–wife poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.[249] In particular, partisan scholars of Zelda frequently depict Scott Fitzgerald as a domineering husband who drove his wife insane.[250]

In response to this narrative, Zelda's daughter Scottie Fitzgerald wrote an essay dispelling such "inaccurate" interpretations.[251] She particularly objected to revisionist depictions of her mother as "the classic 'put down' wife, whose efforts to express her artistic nature were thwarted by a typically male chauvinist husband".[252] In contrast, Scottie insisted "that my father greatly appreciated and encouraged his wife's unusual talents and ebullient imagination. Not only did he arrange for the first showing of her paintings in New York in 1934 he sat through long hours of rehearsals of her one play, Scandalabra, staged by a Little Theater group in Baltimore; he spent many hours editing the short stories she told to College Humor and to Scribner's Magazine."[252] Towards the end of her life, Scottie wrote a final coda about her parents to a biographer: "I have never been able to buy the notion that it was my father's drinking which led her to the sanitarium. Nor do I think she led him to the drinking."[250]

Legacy and influence edit

Zelda was the inspiration for "Witchy Woman",[23] the song of seductive enchantresses written by Don Henley and Bernie Leadon for the Eagles, after Henley read Zelda's biography; of the muse, the partial genius behind her husband F. Scott Fitzgerald, the wild, bewitching, mesmerizing, quintessential "flapper" of the Jazz Age.[253]

Zelda's name served as inspiration for Princess Zelda, the eponymous character of The Legend of Zelda series of video games.[254] In 2003, a wild turkey which roamed Battery Park in New York City was named Zelda due to a famous episode when, during one of her nervous breakdowns, she went missing and was found in Battery Park, apparently having walked several miles downtown.[255][256] In 1989, the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald museum opened in Montgomery, Alabama. The museum is in a house they briefly rented in 1931 and 1932. It is one of the few places where some of Zelda's paintings are kept on display.[257]

In 1992, Zelda and her daughter Scottie were posthumously inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame.[258]

In 2023, Hatteras Sky and Lark Hotels planned three boutique hotels in Asheville, North Carolina, two of which will have Zelda Fitzgerald themes. Zelda Dearest, with 20 rooms, will have the "beauty and optimism" of Zelda's early life. Zelda Salon, named for Gertrude Stein's home in France, will have 35 rooms, with the design based on where the Fitzgeralds stayed in the 1920s.[259]

References edit

Notes edit

  1. ^ During a drive along the mountainous roads of the Côte d'Azur in France, Zelda seized the steering wheel and tried to kill herself, her husband, and their 9-year-old daughter Scottie by driving over a cliff.[5]
  2. ^ According to Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli, "Zelda does not say she collaborated on The Beautiful and Damned: only that Fitzgerald incorporated a portion of her diary 'on one page' and that he revised 'scraps' of her letters. None of Fitzgerald's surviving manuscripts shows her hand".[114]
  3. ^ Fessenden (2005) argues that Fitzgerald struggled with his sexual orientation.[173] In contrast, Bruccoli (2002) insists that "anyone can be called a latent homosexual, but there is no evidence that Fitzgerald was ever involved in a homosexual attachment".[164]

Citations edit

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h Tate 1998, p. 85.
  2. ^ Fitzgerald 2004, p. 46.
  3. ^ a b Cline 2002, p. 87: "They filled their first weeks with antics, and the newspapers filled their pages with the Fitzgeralds.... As enfants terribles, they did provoke people, but they were never vulgar and often funny, so they got away with it."
  4. ^ a b Curnutt 2004, pp. 31, 62; Bruccoli 2002, p. 131.
  5. ^ a b Milford 1970, p. 156.
  6. ^ Milford 1970, p. 156; Stamberg 2013.
  7. ^ a b Bruccoli 2002, p. 201: "One night Fitzgerald woke the Murphys with the report that Zelda had taken an overdose of sleeping pills and they helped him keep her awake. It is not clear whether her suicide gesture was related to the Jozan crisis."
  8. ^ a b Milford 1970, pp. 161, 387: "They did not yet realize the extent of Zelda's breakdown, nor the amount of time that it would take to 'cure' her, nor even if she could be cured. She was diagnosed by Dr. Forel as a schizophrenic."
  9. ^ a b Bruccoli 2002, p. 305: "After Zelda suffered relapses in the fall of 1930, Dr. Paul Eugen Bleuler was called in for a consultation on 22 November. He was the leading authority on schizophrenia, which he had named.... Dr. Bleuler confirmed Dr. Forel's diagnosis and offered as hope that three out of four cases of schizophrenia were curable."
  10. ^ Stamberg 2013.
  11. ^ a b c Bruccoli 2002, pp. 327–328.
  12. ^ a b c d Bruccoli 2002, pp. 343, 362.
  13. ^ a b Bruccoli 2002, p. 343.
  14. ^ a b Fitzgerald 1991, p. vi: According to her daughter, Scott Fitzgerald arranged "for the first showing of her paintings in New York in 1934".
  15. ^ Bruccoli 2002, pp. 486–489.
  16. ^ a b c d Milford 1970, pp. 382–383.
  17. ^ a b Cline 2002, p. 359: "Carroll was pioneering injections of placental blood, honey and hypertonic solutions, and of horse blood, into patients' cerebrospinal fluid. Horse serum caused aseptic meningitis with vomiting, fever and head pains, but Carroll used it on Zelda because it could induce long spells of lucidity. He also regularly gave Zelda the now standard electro-shock and insulin shock treatments, disregarding their known effects of memory loss."
  18. ^ a b Cline 2002, p. 286: "Zelda was administered insulin shock treatments which were continued for ten years."
  19. ^ a b Cline 2002, p. 351.
  20. ^ a b c d e f Smith 2022.
  21. ^ Young 1979; Smith 2022.
  22. ^ a b Cline 2002, p. 402: Willie May Hall "claimed she had wanted to start 'a little trouble' to show up the night watchman, who had spurned her advances and would get the blame."
  23. ^ a b c Sandomir 2022.
  24. ^ a b Davis 1995, p. 327; Tavernier-Courbin 1979, p. 23.
  25. ^ a b Tavernier-Courbin 1979, p. 22.
  26. ^ a b c Davis 1995, p. 327.
  27. ^ a b c Adair 2005.
  28. ^ Alabama Women's Hall of Fame 1992.
  29. ^ Milford 1970, p. 43; Bruccoli 2002, p. 91.
  30. ^ a b Tate 1998, p. 85; Cline 2002, p. 13.
  31. ^ Tate 2007, p. 373.
  32. ^ Levitsky & Ziblatt 2018, p. 111; Kousser 1974, pp. 134–137.
  33. ^ Warren 2011; Lanahan 1996, p. 444.
  34. ^ Bate 2021, p. 251.
  35. ^ Daniel 2021: "... that Fitzgerald introduced an incestuous rape into the plot of Tender is the Night at the end of 1931 because Zelda might have been raped by her father, Judge Anthony Sayre..."
  36. ^ Tate 1998, p. 59.
  37. ^ Tate 1998, p. 85; Milford 1970, p. 3.
  38. ^ a b Bruccoli, Smith & Kerr 2003, p. 38.
  39. ^ National Archives 2016.
  40. ^ a b Milford 1970, pp. 3–4.
  41. ^ Milford 1970, p. 5.
  42. ^ Davis 1924, pp. 45, 56, 59; Bowers 1929, p. 310; The Montgomery Advertiser 1960, p. 4.
  43. ^ Svrluga 2016; Hauser 2022; Holthouse 2008.
  44. ^ Upchurch 2004.
  45. ^ a b Wagner-Martin 2004, p. 24.
  46. ^ a b Cline 2002, p. 13.
  47. ^ Wagner-Martin 2004, p. 24; Bruccoli 2002, pp. 189, 437.
  48. ^ Turnbull 1962, p. 111: "Zelda was no housekeeper. Sketchy about ordering meals, she completely ignored the laundry".
  49. ^ a b Milford 1970, pp. 9–13.
  50. ^ Wagner-Martin 2004, p. 211.
  51. ^ a b c Milford 1970, pp. 16–17.
  52. ^ Cline 2002, pp. 23–25, 37.
  53. ^ Milford 1970, p. 22.
  54. ^ Milford 1970, p. 32; Mizener 1951, p. 70.
  55. ^ Mizener 1951, p. 70.
  56. ^ a b Bruccoli 2002, pp. 80, 82: Fitzgerald wished to die in battle, and he hoped that his unpublished novel would become a great success in the wake of his death.
  57. ^ Tate 1998, pp. 6, 32; Bruccoli 2002, pp. 79, 82.
  58. ^ a b West 2005, pp. 65–66.
  59. ^ a b c d Milford 1970, pp. 33–34.
  60. ^ a b c d e Turnbull 1962, p. 102.
  61. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 122.
  62. ^ Milford 1970, p. 32.
  63. ^ Cline 2002, p. 65; Bruccoli 2002, p. 95.
  64. ^ Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald 2002, p. 96.
  65. ^ Fitzgerald 1920, p. 304.
  66. ^ a b Fitzgerald 1991, p. vii: According to her daughter Scottie, "the tombstones in the Confederate Cemetery at Oakwood" was "her favorite place to be when she felt quite alone."
  67. ^ Turnbull 1962, p. 102: "As they lingered among the headstones of the Confederate dead, Zelda said Fitzgerald would never understand how she felt about those graves".
  68. ^ West 2005, pp. 67–68; Bruccoli 2002, p. 86.
  69. ^ West 2005, p. 73.
  70. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 111.
  71. ^ West 2005, p. 73; Bruccoli 2002, p. 89.
  72. ^ Milford 1970, pp. 35–36; Bruccoli 2002, p. 89.
  73. ^ Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald 2002, pp. 314–315: "By your own admission many years after (and for which I have [never] reproached you) you had been seduced and provincially outcast. I sensed this the night we slept together first for you're a poor bluffer".
  74. ^ Turnbull 1962, p. 70: "It seemed on one March [1916] afternoon that I had lost every single thing I wanted—and that night was the first time I hunted down the spectre of womanhood that, for a little while, makes everything else seem unimportant."
  75. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 91: Fitzgerald wrote on December 4, 1918, "My mind is firmly made up that I will not, shall not, can not, should not, must not marry".
  76. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 91.
  77. ^ Mizener 1951, pp. 85, 89, 90: "Zelda would question whether he was ever going to make enough money for them to marry", and Fitzgerald was thus compelled to prove that "he was rich enough for her."
  78. ^ Milford 1970, pp. 35–36.
  79. ^ a b c Bruccoli 2002, p. 109.
  80. ^ Cline 2002, p. 73.
  81. ^ Milford 1970, p. 42; Turnbull 1962, p. 92.
  82. ^ Tate 1998, p. 82: "Unwilling to wait while Fitzgerald succeeded in the advertisement business and unwilling to live on his small salary, Zelda broke their engagement."
  83. ^ Milford 1970, p. 52: "When everything in New York had failed him, his career and his writing, he turned to Zelda with a proposal of immediate marriage... It was an effort on Scott's part to redeem at least a fraction of his dreams for success and happiness, but Zelda must have felt it to be founded in failure and she could not accept marriage on that basis."
  84. ^ Bruccoli 2002, pp. 95–96; Fitzgerald 1966, p. 108.
  85. ^ Turnbull 1962, pp. 93–94.
  86. ^ a b Bruccoli 2002, p. 96.
  87. ^ a b c Bruccoli 2002, p. 97.
  88. ^ Milford 1970, p. 55; West 2005, pp. 65, 74, 95.
  89. ^ Fitzgerald 1945, p. 86.
  90. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 99.
  91. ^ Milford 1970, p. 57.
  92. ^ Turnbull 1962, p. 105; Bruccoli 2002, p. 128.
  93. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 479: Fitzgerald wrote in 1939, "You [Zelda] submitted at the moment of our marriage when your passion for me was at as low ebb as mine for you. ... I never wanted the Zelda I married. I didn't love you again till after you became pregnant."
  94. ^ Turnbull 1962, p. 102: "Victory was sweet, though not as sweet as it would have been six months earlier before Zelda had rejected him. Fitzgerald couldn't recapture the thrill of their first love".
  95. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 437: In July 1938, Fitzgerald wrote to his daughter that, "I decided to marry your mother after all, even though I knew she was spoiled and meant no good to me. I was sorry immediately I had married her but, being patient in those days, made the best of it".
  96. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 129: Describing his marriage to Zelda, Fitzgerald said that—aside from "long conversations" late at night—their relations lacked "a closeness" which they never "achieved in the workaday world of marriage."
  97. ^ a b c Turnbull 1962, p. 110.
  98. ^ Mizener 1972, p. 28: "Ginevra gave substance to an ideal Fitzgerald would cling to for a lifetime; to the end of his days, the thought of her could bring tears to his eyes."
  99. ^ Stevens 2003; Noden 2003; Corrigan 2014, p. 58.
  100. ^ a b c Graham & Frank 1958, p. 180.
  101. ^ a b c d e f g Graham & Frank 1958, p. 242.
  102. ^ Bruccoli 2002, pp. 131–32.
  103. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. xxv.
  104. ^ Wagner-Martin 2004, p. 24; Bruccoli 2002, pp. 139, 189, 437; Turnbull 1962, p. 111.
  105. ^ a b c Graham & Frank 1958, p. 241.
  106. ^ Milford 1970, p. 95.
  107. ^ a b Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald 2002, p. xxvii, Introduction.
  108. ^ a b c d e f g Bruccoli 2002, p. 143.
  109. ^ Cline 2002, p. 108.
  110. ^ a b Cline 2002, p. 111.
  111. ^ Curnutt 2004, p. 32.
  112. ^ Tate 1998, p. 85; Mizener 1951, p. 63.
  113. ^ Milford 1970, p. 84; Mizener 1951, p. 63.
  114. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 166.
  115. ^ a b c d e f Tate 1998, p. 86.
  116. ^ Fitzgerald 1966, pp. 355–356.
  117. ^ Milford 1970, p. 89.
  118. ^ a b Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald 2002, pp. xxvii–viii.
  119. ^ Tate 1998, p. 14: "The review was partly a joke".
  120. ^ a b c d Fitzgerald 1991, p. vi.
  121. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 162.
  122. ^ Conor 2004, p. 209: "More than any other type of the Modern Woman, it was the Flapper who embodied the scandal which attached to women's new public visibility, from their increasing street presence to their mechanical reproduction as spectacles".
  123. ^ Conor 2004, pp. 210, 221.
  124. ^ Fitzgerald 1945, p. 16, "Echoes of the Jazz Age": The flappers, "if they get about at all, know the taste of gin or corn at sixteen".
  125. ^ Fitzgerald 1945, pp. 14–15, "Echoes of the Jazz Age": "Unchaperoned young people of the smaller cities had discovered the mobile privacy of that automobile given to young Bill at sixteen to make him 'self-reliant'. At first petting was a desperate adventure even under such favorable conditions, but presently confidences were exchanged and the old commandment broke down".
  126. ^ a b Milford 1970, pp. 91–92.
  127. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 158; Curnutt 2004, p. 31.
  128. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 158.
  129. ^ a b Milford 1970, p. 88.
  130. ^ Turnbull 1962, p. 140; Mizener 1951, pp. 155–156.
  131. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 185.
  132. ^ Fitzgerald 1945, p. 21; Pollak 2015, p. MB2.
  133. ^ a b Bruccoli 2002, p. xxvi.
  134. ^ Fitzgerald 1945, p. 272.
  135. ^ Tate 1998, p. 86; Bruccoli 2002, p. 195; Milford 1970, pp. 108–112.
  136. ^ a b c Bruccoli 2002, p. 195.
  137. ^ Tate 1998, p. 86: "It is impossible to determine whether the affair was consummated".
  138. ^ a b Milford 1970, pp. 108–112.
  139. ^ a b Milford 1970, pp. 108–112; Bruccoli 2002, pp. 195–196; Tate 1998, p. 86.
  140. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 195: "...Fitzgerald told Sheilah Graham... that he had fought a duel with Jozan".
  141. ^ Tate 1998, p. 86: "Zelda became romantically interested in Edouard, a French naval aviator. It is impossible to determine whether the affair was consummated, but it was nevertheless a damaging breach of trust."
  142. ^ Bruccoli 2002, pp. 195–196.
  143. ^ a b c Bruccoli 2002, p. 196.
  144. ^ Milford 1970, pp. 108–112, 114.
  145. ^ Mizener 1951, p. 164; Milford 1970, p. 112.
  146. ^ Fitzgerald & Perkins 1971, p. 87.
  147. ^ Bruccoli 2002, pp. 206–207.
  148. ^ Milford 1970, p. 113.
  149. ^ Milford 1970, p. 122.
  150. ^ Milford 1970; Bruccoli 2002, p. 226.
  151. ^ Hemingway 1964, p. 186.
  152. ^ a b Hemingway 1964, p. 190.
  153. ^ Hemingway 1964, pp. 180–181.
  154. ^ Bruccoli 2002, pp. 437, 468–469: "She wanted me to work too much for her and not enough for my dream."
  155. ^ Turnbull 1962, pp. 116, 280; Mizener 1951, p. 270.
  156. ^ a b Milford 1970, p. 380.
  157. ^ a b Hemingway 1964, p. 155.
  158. ^ Hemingway 1964, p. 176.
  159. ^ Usher 2014, p. 230.
  160. ^ Fessenden 2005, p. 33.
  161. ^ Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald 2002, p. 65.
  162. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 275: "Zelda extended her attack on Fitzgerald's masculinity by charging that he was involved in a homosexual liaison with Hemingway".
  163. ^ Milford 1970, p. 183.
  164. ^ a b c Bruccoli 2002, p. 275.
  165. ^ Fessenden 2005, p. 28: "Fitzgerald's career records the ambient, dogging pressure to repel charges of his own homosexuality".
  166. ^ a b Bruccoli 2002, p. 284: According to Bruccoli, author Robert McAlmon and other contemporaries in Paris publicly asserted that Fitzgerald was a homosexual, and Hemingway later avoided Fitzgerald due to these rumors.
  167. ^ Milford 1970, p. 154; Kerr 1996, p. 417.
  168. ^ Fessenden 2005, p. 28: "Biographers describe Fay as a 'fin-de-siècle aesthete' of considerable appeal; 'a dandy, always heavily perfumed,' who introduced the teenage Fitzgerald to Oscar Wilde and good wine".
  169. ^ Fessenden 2005, p. 28.
  170. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 275: "If Fay was a homosexual, as has been asserted without proof, Fitzgerald was presumably unaware of it".
  171. ^ Fessenden 2005, p. 30.
  172. ^ Mizener 1951, p. 57: "In February he put on his Show Girl make-up and went to a Psi U dance at the University of Minnesota with his old friend Gus Schurmeier as escort. He spent the evening casually asking for cigarettes in the middle of the dance floor and absent-mindedly drawing a small vanity case from the top of a blue stocking".
  173. ^ Fessenden 2005, pp. 32–33.
  174. ^ Bruccoli 2002, pp. 275, 277.
  175. ^ Milford 1970, p. 117; Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald 2002, p. 57.
  176. ^ Turnbull 1962, p. 352.
  177. ^ a b Bruccoli 2002, p. xxvii.
  178. ^ Buller 2005, p. 9.
  179. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 256.
  180. ^ Turnbull 1962, p. 352; Buller 2005, pp. 6–8.
  181. ^ Wilson 2007, p. 311.
  182. ^ a b c Milford 1970, pp. 135–138.
  183. ^ Milford 1970, p. 141.
  184. ^ Fitzgerald 1991, p. vi: According to their daughter, Scott "was even in favor of her ballet lessons (he paid for them, after all) until dancing became a twenty-four-hour preoccupation which was destroying her physical and mental health."
  185. ^ a b Tate 1998, pp. 86–87, 283.
  186. ^ a b Milford 1970, pp. 141, 157.
  187. ^ Bruccoli 2002, pp. 288–289; Milford 1970, p. 156.
  188. ^ Tate 1998, pp. 87–88, 283; Ludwig 1995, p. 181.
  189. ^ a b c d e f g Tate 1998, pp. 87–88, 283.
  190. ^ a b Milford 1970, p. 179.
  191. ^ Stamberg 2013; Kramer 1996, p. 106.
  192. ^ Graham & Frank 1958, pp. 242–243.
  193. ^ a b Bruccoli 2002, p. 320; Tate 1998, pp. 87–88, 283.
  194. ^ a b c Bruccoli 2002, p. 320.
  195. ^ Milford 1970, pp. 209–212.
  196. ^ Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald 2002, p. 145; Milford 1970, p. 213.
  197. ^ Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald 2002, p. 156.
  198. ^ a b c d e f Berg 1978, pp. 235–236.
  199. ^ Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald 2002, p. 163; Berg 1978, p. 236.
  200. ^ a b Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald 2002, p. 164.
  201. ^ Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald 2002, p. 163.
  202. ^ Berg 1978, pp. 237, 251.
  203. ^ Fitzgerald 1991, p. 9.
  204. ^ Fitzgerald 1966, p. 262.
  205. ^ Berg 1978, p. 250: "She has some mighty bad tricks of writing, but she is now getting over the worst of them."
  206. ^ a b Berg 1978, p. 251.
  207. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. xxviii.
  208. ^ a b c d e Mencken 1989, pp. 44–45.
  209. ^ Mencken 1989, p. 56.
  210. ^ Cline 2002, p. 320; Milford 1970, p. 264.
  211. ^ Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald 2002, p. 207.
  212. ^ Tavernier-Courbin 1979, pp. 31–33.
  213. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 328.
  214. ^ Tavernier-Courbin 1979, p. 36.
  215. ^ Tavernier-Courbin 1979, p. 40.
  216. ^ a b c Milford 1970, pp. 262–263.
  217. ^ a b c d e f g h Graham & Frank 1958, pp. 243–244.
  218. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 345.
  219. ^ a b Bruccoli 2002, p. 362.
  220. ^ a b c Tate 1998, p. 88.
  221. ^ Milford 1970, p. 290.
  222. ^ a b Milford 1970, p. 308.
  223. ^ a b Milford 1970, pp. 311–313.
  224. ^ Corrigan 2014, p. 59; Smith 2003, p. E1; Noden 2003.
  225. ^ MacKie 1970, pp. 17: Commenting upon his alcoholism, Fitzgerald's romantic acquaintance Elizabeth Beckwith MacKie stated the author was "the victim of a tragic historic accident—the accident of Prohibition, when Americans believed that the only honorable protest against a stupid law was to break it."
  226. ^ Graham & Frank 1958, p. 308: "The day came when he realized he was drinking to escape—not only to escape the growing sense of his wasted potentialities but also to dull the guilt he felt over Zelda. 'I feel that I am responsible for what happened to her. I could no longer bear what became of her.'"
  227. ^ Graham & Frank 1958, pp. 255–257, 275, 281, 296, 309.
  228. ^ Turnbull 1962, pp. 298–299; Mizener 1951, p. 283.
  229. ^ Milford 1970, p. 327.
  230. ^ Milford 1970, p. 329; Curnutt 2004, p. 43.
  231. ^ a b Bush 1965, p. 67.
  232. ^ a b Tate 1998, p. 284.
  233. ^ a b Milford 1970, pp. 350–353.
  234. ^ a b c Milford 1970, pp. 379–381, 411: "Zelda was taken with the idea of Fascism as a way of holding everything together, of ordering the masses. She told Piper she joined every organization she could 'to keep things from falling apart and to keep the finer things from being lost or extinguished.'"
  235. ^ Milford 1970, p. 907.
  236. ^ Cline 2002, p. 400.
  237. ^ Young 1979.
  238. ^ Mangum 2016, pp. 27–39.
  239. ^ Mizener 1951, p. 300.
  240. ^ Cole 1984, p. 26: "One hundred fifty-five thousand ASE copies of The Great Gatsby were distributed-as against the twenty-five thousand copies of the novel printed by Scribners between 1925 and 1942".
  241. ^ Wittels 1945.
  242. ^ Mizener 1960.
  243. ^ Prigozy 2002, pp. 15–18.
  244. ^ Prigozy 2002, pp. 18–21.
  245. ^ a b Tavernier-Courbin 1979, p. 23.
  246. ^ Fitzgerald 1991.
  247. ^ Kakutani 1991, p. 15.
  248. ^ Prigozy 2002, pp. 227–233.
  249. ^ Cline 2002, p. 6.
  250. ^ a b Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald 2002, p. xxix.
  251. ^ Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald 2002, pp. xxix, v.
  252. ^ a b Fitzgerald 1991, p. v.
  253. ^ Tate 2007, p. 6.
  254. ^ Ryan 2017.
  255. ^ Graham & Frank 1958, pp. 243–244: "The two men set out in search of her. They found her in Central Park digging a grave in which to bury Scott's pants."
  256. ^ Carlson 2012; Carlson 2014.
  257. ^ Newton 2005.
  258. ^ Alabama Women's Hall of Fame Inductees 2005.
  259. ^ Hofmann, Will (August 21, 2023). "New Asheville boutique hotels focus on Zelda Fitzgerald's history". Asheville Citizen-Times.

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  • Holthouse, David (November 30, 2008), "Activists Confront Hate in Selma, Ala.", Intelligence Report, Montgomery, Alabama: Southern Poverty Law Center, from the original on January 9, 2023, retrieved January 14, 2023, When Morgan represented Alabama in Washington, D.C., following the Civil War, the former Confederate general-turned-grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan and six-term U.S. senator introduced and championed several bills to legalize the practice of racist vigilante murder as a means of preserving white power in the Deep South.
  • Mangum, Bryant (2016), "An Affair of Youth: In Search of Flappers, Belles, and the First Grave of the Fitzgeralds", Broad Street Magazine, Richmond, Virginia: 27–39, from the original on November 22, 2022, retrieved January 14, 2023. Republished online summer 2017.
  • Newton, Wesley Phillips (Spring 2005), "F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum", Alabama Heritage, Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama, no. 76, from the original on May 8, 2014, retrieved January 14, 2023
  • Stamberg, Susan (September 3, 2013), "For F. Scott And Zelda Fitzgerald, A Dark Chapter In Asheville, N.C.", National Public Radio (NPR), Washington, D.C., from the original on July 25, 2022, retrieved January 14, 2023
  • "Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald (1900–1948)", Alabama Women's Hall of Fame, Montgomery, Alabama: State of Alabama, 1992, from the original on February 4, 2003, retrieved January 14, 2023

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December 20, 2023
zelda, fitzgerald, née, sayre, july, 1900, march, 1948, american, novelist, painter, playwright, socialite, born, montgomery, alabama, wealthy, southern, family, became, locally, famous, beauty, high, spirits, 1920, married, writer, scott, fitzgerald, after, p. Zelda Fitzgerald nee Sayre July 24 1900 March 10 1948 was an American novelist painter playwright and socialite 1 Born in Montgomery Alabama to a wealthy Southern family she became locally famous for her beauty and high spirits 1 In 1920 she married writer F Scott Fitzgerald after the popular success of his debut novel This Side of Paradise The novel catapulted the young couple into the public eye and she became known in the national press as the first American flapper 2 Due to their wild antics and incessant partying she and her husband became regarded in the newspapers as the enfants terribles of the Jazz Age 3 4 Alleged infidelity and bitter recriminations soon undermined their marriage After traveling abroad to Europe Zelda s mental health deteriorated and she had suicidal and homicidal tendencies which required psychiatric care a 6 7 Her doctors diagnosed Zelda with schizophrenia 8 9 although later posthumous diagnoses posit bipolar disorder 10 Zelda FitzgeraldFitzgerald in February 1920BornZelda Sayre 1900 07 24 July 24 1900Montgomery Alabama U S DiedMarch 10 1948 1948 03 10 aged 47 Asheville North Carolina U S OccupationNovelist short story writer playwright painter socialitePeriod1920 1948SpouseF Scott Fitzgerald m 1920 died 1940 wbr ChildrenFrances Scott FitzgeraldSignatureWhile institutionalized at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore Maryland she authored the 1932 novel Save Me the Waltz a semi autobiographical account of her early life in the American South during the Jim Crow era and her marriage to F Scott Fitzgerald 11 Upon its publication by Scribner s the novel garnered mostly negative reviews and experienced poor sales 11 The critical and commercial failure of Save Me the Waltz disappointed Zelda and led her to pursue her other interests as a playwright and a painter 12 In Fall 1932 she completed a stage play titled Scandalabra 13 but Broadway producers unanimously declined to produce the play 12 Disheartened Zelda next attempted to paint watercolors but when her husband arranged their exhibition in 1934 the critical response proved equally disappointing 12 14 While the two lived apart Scott died of occlusive coronary arteriosclerosis in December 1940 15 After her husband s death she attempted to write a second novel Caesar s Things but her recurrent voluntary institutionalization for mental illness interrupted her writing and she failed to complete the work 16 By this time she had endured over ten years of electroshock therapy and insulin shock treatments 17 18 and she suffered from severe memory loss 19 In March 1948 while sedated and locked in a room on the fifth floor of Highland Hospital in Asheville North Carolina she died in a fire 16 20 Her body was identified by her dental records and one of her slippers 21 A follow up investigation raised the possibility that the fire had been a work of arson by a disgruntled or mentally disturbed hospital employee 22 20 A 1970 biography by Nancy Milford was a finalist for the National Book Award 23 After the success of Milford s biography scholars viewed Zelda s artistic output in a new light 24 Her novel Save Me the Waltz became the focus of literary studies exploring different facets of the work how her novel contrasted with Scott s depiction of their marriage in Tender Is the Night 25 and how 1920s consumer culture placed mental stress on modern women 26 Concurrently renewed interest began in Zelda s artwork and her paintings were posthumously exhibited in the United States and Europe 27 In 1992 she was inducted into the Alabama Women s Hall of Fame 28 Contents 1 Early life and family background 2 Courtship by F Scott Fitzgerald 3 Marriage and celebrity 4 Pregnancy and Scottie 5 Expatriation to Europe 6 Meeting Ernest Hemingway 7 Obsession and illness 8 Save Me the Waltz 9 Painting and later years 10 Hospital fire and death 11 Critical reappraisal 12 Legacy and influence 13 References 13 1 Notes 13 2 Citations 13 3 Works cited 13 3 1 Primary sources 13 3 2 Print sources 13 3 3 Online sources 14 External linksEarly life and family background edit nbsp nbsp Zelda Fitzgerald in a 1918 photo from her high school yearbook left and at 19 years old in a dance costume right Born in Montgomery Alabama on July 24 1900 Zelda Sayre was the youngest of six children 1 Her parents were Episcopalians 29 Her mother Minerva Buckner Minnie Machen named her daughter after the gypsy heroine in a novel presumably Jane Howard s Zelda A Tale of the Massachusetts Colony 1866 or Robert Edward Francillon s Zelda s Fortune 1874 30 Zelda was a spoiled child her mother doted upon her daughter s every whim but her father Alabama politician Anthony Dickinson Sayre was a strict and remote man whom Zelda described as a living fortress 31 30 Sayre was a state legislator in the post Reconstruction era who authored the landmark 1893 Sayre Act which disenfranchised black Alabamians for seventy years and ushered in the racially segregated Jim Crow period in the state 32 33 There is scholarly speculation regarding whether Anthony Sayre sexually abused Zelda as a child based on later writings 34 35 but there is no evidence confirming that Zelda was a victim of incest 36 At the time of Zelda s birth her family was a prominent and influential Southern clan who had been slave holders before the Civil War 37 38 39 According to biographer Nancy Milford if there was a Confederate establishment in the Deep South Zelda Sayre came from the heart of it 40 Zelda s maternal grandfather was Willis Benson Machen a Confederate Senator and later an U S Senator from Kentucky 40 Her father s uncle was John Tyler Morgan 41 a Confederate general and the second Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama 42 43 An outspoken advocate of lynching who served six terms in the United States Senate Morgan played a key role in laying the foundation for the Jim Crow era in the American South 44 In addition to wielding considerable influence in national politics Zelda s extended family owned the First White House of the Confederacy 45 38 According to biographer Sally Cline in Zelda s girlhood ghosts of the late Confederacy drifted through the sleepy oak lined streets 46 and Zelda claimed that she drew her strength from Montgomery s Confederate past 46 During her idle youth in Montgomery Zelda s affluent Southern family employed half a dozen domestic servants many of whom were African American 45 Consequently Zelda was unaccustomed to domestic labor or responsibilities of any kind 47 48 As the privileged child of wealthy parents 1 she danced took ballet lessons and enjoyed the outdoors 49 In her youth the family spent summers in Saluda North Carolina a village that would appear in her artwork decades later 50 In 1914 Zelda began attending Sidney Lanier High School 1 She was bright but uninterested in her lessons During high school she continued her interest in ballet She also drank gin smoked cigarettes and spent much of her time flirting with boys 51 A newspaper article about one of her dance performances quoted her as saying that she cared only about boys and swimming 51 She developed an appetite for attention actively seeking to flout convention whether by dancing or by wearing a tight flesh colored bathing suit to fuel rumors that she swam nude 51 Her father s reputation was something of a safety net preventing her social ruin 49 As Southern women of the time were expected to be delicate and docile Zelda s antics shocked the local community and she became along with her childhood friend and future Hollywood star Tallulah Bankhead a mainstay of Montgomery gossip 52 Her ethos was encapsulated beneath her high school graduation photo Why should all life be work when we all can borrow Let s think only of today and not worry about tomorrow 53 Upon her graduation from high school she was voted the prettiest and most attractive in her graduating class 1 Courtship by F Scott Fitzgerald editMain article F Scott Fitzgerald nbsp F Scott Fitzgerald photographed in 1917 a few months before meeting Zelda in MontgomeryIn July 1918 Zelda Sayre first met aspiring novelist F Scott Fitzgerald at the Montgomery Country Club 1 At the time Fitzgerald had been freshly rejected by his first love Chicago socialite and heiress Ginevra King due to his lack of financial prospects 54 Heartbroken by this rejection Scott had dropped out of Princeton University and volunteered for the United States Army amid World War I 55 56 While awaiting deployment to the Western front 56 he was stationed at Camp Sheridan outside Montgomery 57 While writing Ginevra King and begging her to resume their relationship 58 a lonely Fitzgerald began courting Zelda and other young Montgomery women 58 Scott called Zelda daily and he visited Montgomery on his free days 59 He often spoke of his ambition to become a famous novelist and he sent her a chapter of a book he was writing 59 At the time Zelda dismissed Fitzgerald s remarks as mere boastfulness and she concluded that he would never become a famous writer 60 Infatuated with Zelda Scott redrafted the character of Rosalind Connage in his unpublished manuscript The Romantic Egotist to resemble her 61 and he told Zelda that the heroine does resemble you in more ways than four 62 In addition to inspiring the character of Rosalind Connage Fitzgerald used a quote from Zelda s letters for a soliloquy by the narrator at the conclusion of The Romantic Egotist later retitled and published as This Side of Paradise 63 Specifically Zelda had written Fitzgerald a letter eulogizing the Confederate dead who perished during the American Civil War I ve spent today in the graveyard Isn t it funny how out of a row of Confederate soldiers two or three will make you think of dead lovers and dead loves when they re exactly like the others even to the yellowish moss 64 In the final pages of his novel Fitzgerald altered Zelda s sentiments to refer to Union soldiers instead of Confederates 65 During the early months of their courtship Zelda and Scott strolled through the Confederate Cemetery at Oakwood 60 66 While walking past the headstones Fitzgerald ostensibly failed to show sufficient reverence and Zelda informed Fitzgerald that he would never understand how she felt about the Confederate dead 67 66 Fitzgerald drew upon Zelda s intense feelings about the Confederacy and the Old South in his 1920 short story The Ice Palace about a Southern girl who becomes lost in an ice maze while visiting a northern town 60 nbsp While courting Zelda Sayre F Scott Fitzgerald continued to write Ginevra King and begged to resume their former relationship While dating Zelda and other women in Montgomery Fitzgerald received a letter from Ginevra King informing him of her engagement to polo player William Bill Mitchell 68 Three days after Ginevra King married Bill Mitchell on September 4 1918 Scott professed his affections for Zelda 69 In his ledger Scott wrote that he had fallen in love on September 7 1918 1 His love for Zelda increased as time passed and he wrote to his friend Isabelle Amorous I love her and that s the beginning and end of everything You re still a Catholic but Zelda s the only God I have left now 70 Ultimately Zelda fell in love as well 59 Her biographer Nancy Milford wrote Scott had appealed to something in Zelda which no one before him had perceived a romantic sense of self importance which was kindred to his own 59 Their courtship was interrupted in October when he was summoned north He expected to be sent to France but he was instead assigned to Camp Mills Long Island While he was there the Allied Powers signed an armistice with Imperial Germany He then returned to the base near Montgomery 71 Together again Zelda and Scott now engaged in what he later described as sexual recklessness and by December 1918 they had consummated their relationship 72 Although this was the first time they were sexually intimate both Zelda and Scott had other sexual partners prior to their first meeting and courtship 73 74 Initially Fitzgerald did not intend to marry Zelda 75 but the couple gradually viewed themselves as informally engaged although Zelda declined to marry him until he proved financially successful 76 77 On February 14 1919 he was discharged from the military and went north to establish himself in New York City 78 During this time Zelda mistakenly feared she was pregnant 79 Scott mailed her pills to induce an abortion but Zelda refused to take them and replied in a letter I simply can t and won t take those awful pills I d rather have a whole family than sacrifice my self respect I d feel like a damn whore if I took even one 80 79 They wrote frequently and by March 1920 Scott had sent Zelda his mother s ring and the two had become engaged 81 However when Scott s attempts to become a published author faltered during the next four months Zelda became convinced that he could not support her accustomed lifestyle and she broke off the engagement during the Red Summer of 1919 82 83 Having been rejected by both Zelda and Ginevra during the past year due to his lack of financial prospects Scott suffered from intense despair 84 and he carried a revolver daily while contemplating suicide 85 Soon after in July 1919 Fitzgerald returned to St Paul 86 Having returned to his hometown as a failure Fitzgerald became a social recluse and lived on the top floor of his parents home at 599 Summit Avenue on Cathedral Hill 87 He decided to make one last attempt to become a novelist and to stake everything on the success of a book 86 Abstaining from alcohol and parties 87 he worked day and night to revise The Romantic Egotist as This Side of Paradise an autobiographical account of his Princeton years and his romances with Ginevra Zelda and others 88 At the time Fitzgerald s feelings for Zelda were at an all time low and he remarked to a friend I wouldn t care if she died but I couldn t stand to have anybody else marry her 87 Marriage and celebrity edit nbsp After marrying in April 1920 Zelda became homesick for the Deep South She and Scott embarked that summer on a road trip to visit her family in Montgomery Alabama By September 1919 Scott completed his first novel This Side of Paradise and editor Maxwell Perkins of Charles Scribner s Sons accepted the manuscript for publication 89 Scott requested an accelerated release to renew Zelda s faith in him I have so many things dependent on its success including of course a girl 90 After Scott informed Zelda of his novel s upcoming publication a shocked Zelda replied apologetically I hate to say this but I don t think I had much confidence in you at first It s so nice to know you really can do things do anything and I love to feel that maybe I can help just a little 60 Zelda agreed to marry Scott once Scribner s published the novel 79 in turn Fitzgerald promised to bring her to New York with all the iridescence of the beginning of the world 91 Scribner s published This Side of Paradise on March 26 1920 and Zelda arrived in New York on March 30 A few days later on April 3 1920 they married in a small ceremony at St Patrick s Cathedral 92 At the time of their wedding Fitzgerald later claimed neither he nor Zelda still loved each other 93 94 and the early years of their marriage in New York City proved to be a disappointment 95 96 97 According to biographer Andrew Turnbull victory was sweet though not as sweet as it would have been six months earlier before Zelda had rejected him Fitzgerald couldn t recapture the thrill of their first love 60 As the affections between Zelda and Scott cooled her husband continued to obsess over the loss of his first love Ginevra King and for the remainder of their marriage Scott could not think of Ginevra without tears coming to his eyes 98 99 Despite the cooling of their affections Scott and Zelda quickly became celebrities of New York as much for their wild behavior as for the success of This Side of Paradise They were ordered to leave both the Biltmore Hotel and the Commodore Hotel for disturbing other guests 97 Their daily lives consisted of outrageous pranks and drunken escapades 100 While fully dressed they jumped into the water fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel in New York 100 They frequently hired taxicabs and rode on the hood 100 One evening while inebriated they decided to visit the county morgue where they inspected the unidentified corpses and on another evening Zelda insisted on sleeping in a dog kennel 101 Alcohol increasingly fueled their nightly escapades Publicly this meant little more than napping when they arrived at parties but privately it increasingly led to bitter arguments 102 To their mutual delight New York newspapers depicted Zelda and Scott as cautionary examples of youth and excess the enfants terribles of the hedonistic Jazz Age 3 4 nbsp nbsp Zelda and Scott at the beach in Westport Connecticut circa March 1922 left and a profile sketch of Zelda by artist Gordan Bryant published in Metropolitan Magazine in June 1922 right After a month of hotel evictions 97 the Fitzgeralds moved to a cottage in Westport Connecticut where Scott worked on drafts of his second novel 103 Due to her privileged upbringing with many African American servants Zelda could not perform household responsibilities at Westport 104 During the early months of their marriage Scott s unwashed clothes began disappearing 105 One day he opened a closet and discovered his dirty clothes piled to the ceiling 105 Uncertain of what to do with unwashed clothes Zelda had never sent them out for cleaning she had simply tossed everything into the closet 105 Soon after Scott employed two maids and a laundress 106 Zelda s complete dependence upon servants became the comedic focus of magazine articles 107 When Harper amp Brothers asked Zelda to contribute her favorite recipes in an article she wrote See if there is any bacon and if there is ask the cook which pan to fry it in Then ask if there are any eggs and if so try and persuade the cook to poach two of them It is better not to attempt toast as it burns very easily Also in the case of bacon do not turn the fire too high or you will have to get out of the house for a week Serve preferably on china plates though gold or wood will do if handy 107 While Scott attempted to write his next novel at their home in Westport Zelda announced that she was homesick for the Deep South 108 In particular she missed eating Southern cuisine such as peaches and biscuits for breakfast 108 She suggested that they travel to Montgomery Alabama 108 On July 15 1920 the couple traveled in a touring car which Scott derogatorily nicknamed the rolling junk to her parents home in Montgomery 108 After visiting Zelda s family for several weeks they abandoned the unreliable vehicle and returned via train to Westport Connecticut 108 Zelda s parents visited their Westport cottage soon after but her father Judge Anthony Sayre took a dim view of the couples constant partying and scandalous lifestyle 108 Following this visit the Fitzgeralds relocated to an apartment at 38 West 59th Street in New York City 108 Pregnancy and Scottie edit nbsp nbsp The cover left of The Beautiful and Damned with the characters of Anthony and Gloria drawn by W E Hill to resemble Scott and Zelda juxtaposed with a sketch right by Zelda in which she envisioned the dust jacket for the novel Ultimately the publisher used W E Hill s work for the dust jacket In February 1921 while Scott labored on drafts of his inchoate second novel The Beautiful and Damned Zelda discovered she was pregnant 109 She requested that the child be born on Southern soil in Alabama but Fitzgerald adamantly refused 110 Zelda wrote despondently to a friend Scott s changed He used to say he loved the South but now he wants to get as far away from it as he can 110 To Zelda s chagrin her husband insisted upon having the baby at his northern home in Saint Paul Minnesota 111 On October 26 1921 she gave birth to Frances Scottie Fitzgerald As she emerged from the anesthesia Scott recorded Zelda saying Oh God goofo I m drunk Mark Twain Isn t she smart she has the hiccups I hope it s beautiful and a fool a beautiful little fool 112 Many of her words found their way into Scott s novels in The Great Gatsby the character Daisy Buchanan expresses a similar hope for her daughter 113 While writing The Beautiful and Damned Scott drew upon bits and pieces of Zelda s diary and letters b 115 He modeled the characters of Anthony Patch on himself and Gloria Patch on in his words the chill mindedness and selfishness of Zelda 116 Prior to publication Zelda proofread the drafts and she urged her husband to cut the cerebral ending which focused on the main characters lost idealism 115 Upon its publication Burton Rascoe the newly appointed literary editor of the New York Tribune approached Zelda for an opportunity to entice readers with a satirical review of Scott s latest work as a publicity stunt 117 Although Zelda had carefully proofread drafts of the novel 115 she pretended in her review to read the novel for the very first time and she wrote partly in jest that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine and also scraps of letters which though considerably edited sound to me vaguely familiar In fact Mr Fitzgerald I believe that is how he spells his name seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home 118 119 In the same review Zelda joked that she hoped her husband s novel would become a commercial success as there is the cutest cloth of gold dress for only 300 in a store on Forty second Street 118 nbsp In Spring 1924 Zelda was detained by the New York Police Department on suspicion of being the infamous Bobbed Haired Bandit later identified as Celia Cooney pictured Soon after Zelda and her husband departed New York for Europe The satirical review led to Zelda receiving offers from other magazines to write stories and articles According to their daughter Scott spent many hours editing the short stories she sold to College Humor and to Scribner s Magazine 120 In June 1922 Metropolitan Magazine published an essay by Zelda Fitzgerald titled Eulogy on the Flapper 121 At the time flappers were typically young modern women who bobbed their hair and wore short skirts 122 123 They also drank alcohol and had premarital sex 124 125 Though ostensibly a piece about the decline of the flapper lifestyle after its heyday in the early 1920s Zelda s biographer Nancy Milford wrote that Zelda s essay served as a defense of her own code of existence 126 In the article Zelda described the ephemeral phenomenon of the flapper The Flapper awoke from her lethargy of sub deb ism bobbed her hair put on her choicest pair of earrings and a great deal of audacity and rouge and went into the battle She flirted because it was fun to flirt and wore a one piece bathing suit because she had a good figure she was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do Mothers disapproved of their sons taking the Flapper to dances to teas to swim and most of all to heart 126 After the publication of The Beautiful and Damned in March 1922 the Fitzgeralds traveled to either New York or St Paul in order for Zelda to procure an abortion 127 Ultimately Zelda would have three abortions during their marriage and her sister Rosalind later questioned whether Zelda s later mental deterioration was due to health side effects of these unsafe procedures 128 Zelda s thoughts on terminating her second pregnancy are unknown but in the first draft of The Beautiful and Damned Scott wrote a scene in which Gloria Gilbert believes she is pregnant and Anthony Patch suggests she talk to some woman and find out what s best to be done Most of them fix it some way 129 Anthony s suggestion was removed from the final version and this significant alteration shifted the focus from a moral dilemma about the act of abortion to Gloria s superficial concern that a baby would ruin her figure 129 Following the financial failure of Scott s play The Vegetable 130 the Fitzgeralds found themselves mired in debt Although Scott wrote short stories furiously to pay the bills he became burned out and depressed 131 During this period while Scott wrote short stories at home the New York Police Department detained Zelda near the Queensboro Bridge on the suspicion of her being the Bobbed Haired Bandit an infamous spree robber later identified as Celia Cooney 132 Following this incident the couple departed in April 1924 for Paris France in the hope of living a more frugal existence abroad in Europe 133 Expatriation to Europe edit nbsp Zelda Scott and their daughter Scottie pictured in their passport book for their trip to Europe in 1924 After arriving in Paris the couple soon relocated to Antibes on the French Riviera 134 While Scott labored on drafts of The Great Gatsby Zelda became infatuated with a French naval aviator Edouard Jozan 135 The exact details of the supposed romance are unverifiable and contradictory 136 137 and Jozan himself claimed the Fitzgeralds invented the entire incident 138 According to conflicting accounts Zelda spent afternoons swimming at the beach and evenings dancing at the casinos with Jozan After several weeks she asked Scott for a divorce 139 Scott purportedly challenged Jozan to duel and locked Zelda in their villa until he could kill him 140 Before any fatal confrontation could occur Jozan who had no intention of marrying Zelda fled the Riviera and the Fitzgeralds never saw him again 139 Soon after Zelda possibly overdosed on sleeping pills 7 On his part Jozan dismissed the entire story as pure fabrication and claimed no romance with Zelda had ever occurred They both had a need of drama they made it up and perhaps they were the victims of their own unsettled and a little unhealthy imagination 138 141 In later retellings both Zelda and Scott embellished the story and Zelda later falsely told Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley Richardson that the affair ended when Jozan committed suicide 142 In fact Jozan had been transferred by the French military to Indochina 143 Regardless of whether any extramarital affair with Jozan occurred 144 the episode led to a breach of trust in their marriage 145 and Fitzgerald wrote in his notebook I knew something had happened that could never be repaired 136 The incident likely influenced Fitzgerald s writing of The Great Gatsby and he drew upon many elements of his tempestuous relationship with Zelda including the loss of certainty in her love 143 In August he wrote to his friend Ludlow Fowler I feel old too this summer the whole burden of this novel the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world that you don t care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory 143 Scott finalized The Great Gatsby in October 1924 133 The couple attempted to celebrate with travel to Rome and Capri but both were unhappy and unhealthy When he received the galleys for his novel Scott fretted over the best title Trimalchio in West Egg just Trimalchio or Gatsby Gold hatted Gatsby or The High bouncing Lover Disliking Fitzgerald s chosen title of Trimalchio in West Egg editor Max Perkins persuaded him that the reference was too obscure and that people would be unable to pronounce it 146 After both Zelda and Perkins expressed their preference for The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald agreed 147 It was also on this trip while ill with colitis that Zelda began painting artworks 148 Meeting Ernest Hemingway edit nbsp Writer Ernest Hemingway in 1923 two years before he met Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald in Paris France Returning to Paris in April 1925 Zelda met Ernest Hemingway whose career her husband did much to promote Through Hemingway the Fitzgeralds were introduced to Gertrude Stein Alice B Toklas Robert McAlmon and others 136 Scott and Hemingway became close friends but Zelda and Hemingway disliked each other from their first meeting She openly referred to him with homophobic slurs and denounced him as a fairy with hair on his chest 149 She considered Hemingway s domineering macho persona to be merely a posture to conceal his homosexuality in turn Hemingway told Scott that Zelda was insane 150 In his memoir A Moveable Feast Hemingway claims he realized that Zelda had a mental illness when she insisted that jazz singer Al Jolson was greater than Jesus Christ 151 Hemingway alleged that Zelda sought to destroy her husband and she purportedly taunted Fitzgerald over his penis size 152 After examining it in a public restroom Hemingway confirmed Fitzgerald s penis to be of average size 152 Hemingway claimed that Zelda urged her husband to write lucrative short stories as opposed to novels in order to support her accustomed lifestyle 153 154 To supplement their income Fitzgerald often wrote stories for magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post Collier s Weekly and Esquire 155 I always felt a story in The Post was tops Zelda later recalled But Scott couldn t stand to write them He was completely cerebral you know All mind 156 Scott would write his stories in an authentic manner then rewrite them to add plot twists which increased their salability as magazine stories 157 This whoring for Zelda as Hemingway dubbed these sales emerged as a sore point in their friendship 157 After reading The Great Gatsby Hemingway vowed to put any differences with Fitzgerald aside and to aid him in any way he could although he feared Zelda would derail Fitzgerald s career 158 In a letter to Fitzgerald Hemingway warned him that Zelda would derail his career Of all people on earth you needed discipline in your work and instead you marry someone who is jealous of your work wants to compete with you and ruins you It s not as simple as that and I thought Zelda was crazy the first time I met her and you complicated it even more by being in love with her and of course you re a rummy 159 nbsp Scott s attentions to dancer Isadora Duncan at a party caused Zelda to throw herself down a flight of marble stairs A more serious rift in the Fitzgerald s marriage occurred when Zelda suspected that Scott was closeted homosexual 160 and she alleged that Fitzgerald and Hemingway engaged in homosexual relations 161 162 In the ensuing months she frequently belittled Scott with homophobic slurs during their public excursions 163 Biographer Matthew J Bruccoli posits that Zelda s inordinate preoccupation with other persons sexual behavior likely indicated the onset of her paranoid schizophrenia 164 However Fitzgerald s sexuality was a popular subject of debate among his friends and acquaintances 165 166 167 As a youth Fitzgerald had a close relationship with Father Sigourney Fay 168 a possibly gay Catholic priest 169 170 and Fitzgerald later used his last name for the idealized romantic character of Daisy Fay Buchanan 171 After college Fitzgerald cross dressed during outings in Minnesota and flirted with men at social events 172 While staying in Paris rumors dogged Fitzgerald among the American expat community that he was gay 166 Irritated by Zelda s recurrent homophobic attacks on his sexual identity c Scott decided to have sex with a Parisian prostitute 164 Zelda found condoms that he had purchased before any sexual encounter occurred and a bitter quarrel ensued resulting in ingravescent jealousy 174 Soon after a jealous Zelda threw herself down a flight of marble stairs at a party because Fitzgerald engrossed in talking to American dancer Isadora Duncan ignored her 175 In December 1926 after two unpleasant years in Europe which considerably strained their marriage the Fitzgeralds returned to America but their marital difficulties continued to fester 176 In January 1927 the Fitzgeralds relocated to Los Angeles where Scott wrote Lipstick for United Artists and met Hollywood starlet Lois Moran 177 Jealous of Moran Zelda set fire to her clothing in a bathtub as a self destructive act 178 She disparaged Moran as a breakfast food that many men identified with whatever they missed from life 179 Fitzgerald s relations with Moran exacerbated the Fitzgeralds marital difficulties and after merely two months in Hollywood the unhappy couple relocated to Ellerslie in Wilmington Delaware in March 1927 180 177 Literary critic Edmund Wilson recalling a party at the Fitzgerald home in Edgemoor Delaware in February 1928 described Zelda as follows I sat next to Zelda who was at her iridescent best Some of Scott s friends were irritated others were enchanted by her I was one of the ones who were charmed She had the waywardness of a Southern belle and the lack of inhibitions of a child She talked with so spontaneous a color and wit almost exactly in the way she wrote that I very soon ceased to be troubled by the fact that the conversation was in the nature of a free association of ideas and one could never follow up anything I have rarely known a woman who expressed herself so delightfully and so freshly she had no ready made phrases on the one hand and made no straining for effect on the other It evaporated easily however and I remember only one thing she said that night that the writing of Galsworthy was a shade of blue for which she did not care 181 Obsession and illness edit nbsp Zelda s portrait for her French identity card circa 1929By 1927 at the Ellersie estate in Wilmington Delaware Scott had become severely alcoholic and Zelda s behavior became increasingly erratic 182 Much of the conflict between them stemmed from the boredom and isolation Zelda experienced when Scott was writing 182 She would often interrupt him when he was working and the two grew increasingly miserable 182 Stung by Fitzgerald s criticism that all great women use their talents constructively Zelda had a deep desire to develop a talent that was entirely her own 115 At the age of 28 she became obsessed with Russian ballet and she decided to embark upon a career as a prima ballerina 101 Her friend Gerald Murphy counseled against their ambition and remarked that there are limits to what a woman of Zelda s age can do and it was obvious that she had taken up the dance too late 183 Despite being far too old to achieve such an ambition Scott Fitzgerald paid for Zelda to begin practicing under the tutelage of Catherine Littlefield director of the Philadelphia Opera Ballet 115 184 After the Fitzgeralds returned to Europe in summer 1928 Scott paid for Zelda to study under Russian ballerina Lubov Egorova in Paris 185 In September 1929 the San Carlo Opera Ballet Company in Naples invited her to join their ballet school 185 In preparation Zelda undertook a grueling daily practice of up to eight hours a day 186 and she punished her body in strenuous efforts to improve 115 According to Zelda s daughter although Scott greatly appreciated and encouraged his wife s unusual talents and ebullient imagination 120 he became alarmed when her dancing became a twenty four hour preoccupation which was destroying her physical and mental health 120 Soon after Zelda collapsed from physical and mental exhaustion 186 One evening Scott returned home to find an exhausted Zelda seated on the floor and entranced with a pile of sand 101 When he asked her what she was doing she could not speak 101 He summoned a French physician who examined Zelda and informed him that your wife is mad 101 nbsp Eugen Bleuler one of Europe s leading psychiatrists diagnosed Zelda as schizophrenic in November 1930 Soon after her physical and mental collapse Zelda s mental health further deteriorated 187 In October 1929 during an automobile trip to Paris along the mountainous roads of the Grande Corniche Zelda seized the car s steering wheel and tried to kill herself her husband and her nine year old daughter Scottie by driving over a cliff 5 After this homicidal incident Zelda sought psychiatric treatment On April 23 1930 the Malmaison Clinic near Paris admitted her for observation 188 On May 22 1930 she moved to Valmont sanatorium in Montreux Switzerland 189 The clinic primarily treated gastrointestinal ailments and due to her profound psychological problems she was moved again to a psychiatric facility in Prangins on the shores of Lake Geneva on June 5 1930 189 At Prangins in June Dr Oscar Forel issued a tentative diagnosis of schizophrenia 8 but he feared her psychological condition might be far worse 190 Zelda s biographer Nancy Milford quotes Dr Forel s full diagnosis at length The more I saw Zelda the more I thought at the time that she is neither suffering from a pure neurosis nor a real psychosis I considered her a constitutional emotionally unbalanced psychopath she may improve but never completely recover 190 After five months of observation Doctor Eugen Bleuler one of Europe s leading psychiatrists confirmed Dr Forel s diagnosis of Zelda as a schizophrenic on November 22 1930 9 Following Zelda s death later psychiatrists speculated that Zelda instead had bipolar disorder 191 She was released from Prangins in September 1931 189 In an attempt to keep his wife out of an asylum Scott hired nurses and attendants to care for Zelda at all times 101 Although there were periods where her behavior was merely eccentric she could frequently become a danger to herself and others 101 In one instance she attempted to throw herself in front of a moving train and in another instance she attacked a visiting guest at their home without provocation 192 Despite her precarious mental health the couple traveled to Montgomery Alabama where her father Judge Anthony Sayre lay dying After her father s death her mental health again deteriorated and she had another breakdown 189 Save Me the Waltz editMain article Save Me the Waltz nbsp Portrait of Zelda Fitzgerald by Harrison Fisher 1927In February 1932 after an episode of hysteria Zelda insisted that she be readmitted to a mental hospital 193 Over her husband s objections 194 the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore admitted Zelda on February 12 1932 193 Dr Adolf Meyer an expert on schizophrenia oversaw her treatment 194 As part of her recovery routine she spent at least two hours a day writing a manuscript 195 At the Phipps Clinic Zelda developed a bond with Dr Mildred Squires a female resident 194 When Dr Squires asked Scott to speculate why Zelda s mental health had deteriorated Fitzgerald replied Perhaps fifty percent of our friends and relatives would tell you in all honest conviction that my drinking drove Zelda insane the other half would assure you that her insanity drove me to drink Neither judgement would mean anything 189 Toward the end of February 1932 Zelda shared fragments of her manuscript with Dr Squires who wrote to Scott that the unfinished novel was vivid and had charm 196 Zelda wrote to Scott from the hospital I am proud of my novel but I can hardly restrain myself enough to get it written You will like it It is distinctly Ecole Fitzgerald though more ecstatic than yours perhaps too much so 197 Zelda finished the novel on March 9 She sent the unaltered manuscript to Scott s editor Maxwell Perkins at Scribner s 198 Surprised to receive an unannounced novel in the mail from Zelda Perkins carefully perused the manuscript 198 He concluded the work had a slightly deranged quality which gave him the impression that the author had difficulty in separating fiction from reality 198 He felt the manuscript contained several good sections but its overall tone seemed hopelessly dated and tonally resembled Fitzgerald s 1922 work The Beautiful and Damned 198 Perkins hoped that her husband might be able to improve its overall quality with his criticism 198 Upon learning that Zelda had submitted her manuscript to Perkins Scott became angry that she had not shown her manuscript to him beforehand 199 After reading the manuscript he objected to her novel s plagiarism of his protagonist in This Side of Paradise 198 He was further upset to learn that Zelda s novel used the very same plot elements as his upcoming novel Tender Is the Night 200 After receiving letters from Scott delineating these objections Zelda wrote to Scott apologetically that she was afraid we might have touched the same material 201 nbsp Having met Zelda for lunch in April 1932 writer H L Mencken described her as exhibiting constant signs of mental distress and anguish Despite Scott s initial annoyance a debt ridden Fitzgerald realized that Zelda s book might earn a tidy profit 202 Consequently his requested revisions were relatively few and the disagreement was quickly resolved with Scott recommending the novel to Perkins 200 203 Several weeks later Scott wrote to Perkins Here is Zelda s novel It is a good novel now perhaps a very good novel I am too close to tell It has the faults and virtues of a first novel It should interest the many thousands in dancing It is about something and absolutely new and should sell 204 Although unimpressed 205 Perkins agreed to publish the work as a way for Fitzgerald to repay his financial debt to Scribner s 206 Perkins arranged for half of Zelda s royalties to be applied against Scott s debt to Scribner s until at least 5 000 had been repaid 206 In March 1932 the Phipps Clinic discharged Zelda and she joined her husband Scott and her daughter at the La Paix estate in Baltimore Maryland 207 Although discharged she remained mentally unwell 208 One month later Fitzgerald took her to lunch with critic H L Mencken the literary editor of The American Mercury 208 In his diary Mencken noted Zelda went insane in Paris a year or so ago and is still plainly more or less off her base 208 Throughout the luncheon she manifested signs of mental distress 208 A year later when Mencken met Zelda for the last time he described her mental illness as immediately evident to any onlooker and her mind as only half sane 209 He regretted that F Scott Fitzgerald could not write novels as he had to write magazine stories to pay for Zelda s psychiatric treatment 208 On October 7 1932 Scribner s published Save Me the Waltz with a printing of 3 010 copies not unusually low for a first novel in the middle of the Great Depression on cheap paper with a cover of green linen 210 According to Zelda the book derived its title from a Victor record catalog 211 and the title evoked the romantic glitter of the lifestyle which F Scott Fitzgerald and herself experienced during the riotous Jazz Age The parallels to the Fitzgeralds were obvious The protagonist of the novel is Alabama Beggs like Zelda the daughter of a Southern judge who marries David Knight an aspiring painter who abruptly becomes famous for his work They live the fast life in Connecticut before departing to live in France Dissatisfied with her marriage Alabama throws herself into ballet Though told she has no chance she perseveres and after three years becomes the lead dancer in an opera company Alabama becomes ill from exhaustion however and the novel ends when they return to her family in the South as her father is dying 212 A shooting star an ectoplasmic arrow sped through the nebulous hypothesis like a wanton hummingbird From Venus to Mars to Neptune it trailed the ghost of comprehension illuminating far horizons over the pale battlefields of reality Zelda Fitzgerald Save Me the Waltz 1932 213 Echoing Zelda s frustrations the novel portrays Alabama s struggle to establish herself independently of her husband and to earn respect for her own accomplishments 214 In contrast to Scott s unadorned prose Zelda s writing style in Save Me the Waltz is replete with verbal flourishes and complex metaphors The novel is also deeply sensual as literary scholar Jacqueline Tavernier Courbin observed in 1979 the sensuality arises from Alabama s awareness of the life surge within her the consciousness of the body the natural imagery through which not only emotions but simple facts are expressed the overwhelming presence of the senses in particular touch and smell in every description 215 The reviews of Save Me the Waltz by literary critics were overwhelmingly negative 11 The critics savaged Zelda s florid prose as overwritten attacked her fictional characters as uninteresting and mocked her tragic scenes as grotesquely harlequinade 216 The New York Times published a particularly harsh review and lambasted her editor Max Perkins It is not only that her publishers have not seen fit to curb an almost ludicrous lushness of writing but they have not given the book the elementary services of a literate proofreader 216 The overwhelmingly negative reviews bewildered and distressed Zelda 216 Painting and later years edit nbsp nbsp Two examples of Zelda s paintings Her works such as Fifth Avenue left gouache on paper and Still Life with Cyclamen right watercolor on paper were exhibited in 1934 From the mid 1930s onward Zelda would be hospitalized sporadically for the rest of her life at sanatoriums in Baltimore New York and in Asheville North Carolina 189 When Scott visited Zelda in the sanatoriums she increasingly exhibited signs of mental instability 217 During one visit Scott and friends took Zelda on an outing to a nearby home in Tryon North Carolina 217 During the lunch she became withdrawn and ceased communication 217 On the return drive to the sanatorium she wrenched open the car door and threw herself out of the moving vehicle in an attempt to kill herself 217 In another incident Zelda s unexpected loss of a tennis match at the Asheville sanatorium resulted in her physically attacking her tennis partner and beating them over the head with her tennis racket 217 Despite the deterioration of her mental health she continued pursuing her artistic ambitions After the critical and commercial failure of Save Me the Waltz she attempted to write a farcical stage play titled Scandalabra in Fall 1932 12 189 However after submitting the manuscript to agent Harold Ober Broadway producers rejected her play 13 Following this rejection Scott arranged for her play Scandalabra to be staged by a Little Theater group in Baltimore Maryland and he sat through long hours of rehearsals of the play 120 A year later during a group therapy session with her husband and a psychiatrist Fitzgerald remarked that she was a third rate writer and a third rate ballet dancer 218 Following this remark Zelda attempted to paint watercolors while in and out of sanatoriums 219 In March 1934 Scott Fitzgerald arranged the first exhibition of Zelda s artwork 13 paintings and 15 drawings in New York City 14 220 As with the tepid reception of her book New York critics were ill disposed towards her paintings 219 The New Yorker described them merely as paintings by the almost mythical Zelda Fitzgerald with whatever emotional overtones or associations may remain from the so called Jazz Age No actual description of the paintings was provided in the review 221 Following the critical failure of her artwork exhibition Scott awoke one morning to discover Zelda had gone missing 217 After the arrival of a doctor and several attendants a manhunt ensued in New York City 217 Ultimately they found Zelda in Central Park digging a grave 217 Soon after she became even more violent and reclusive In 1936 Scott placed her in the Highland Hospital in Asheville North Carolina writing to friends 222 Zelda now claims to be in direct contact with Christ William the Conqueror Mary Stuart Apollo and all the stock paraphernalia of insane asylum jokes For what she has really suffered there is never a sober night that I do not pay a stark tribute of an hour to in the darkness In an odd way perhaps incredible to you she was always my child it was not reciprocal as it often is in marriages I was her great reality often the only liaison agent who could make the world tangible to her 222 Zelda remained in the hospital while Scott returned to Hollywood for a 1 000 a week job with MGM in June 1937 223 Estranged from Zelda he attempted to reunite with his first love Ginevra King when she visited California in October 1938 but his uncontrolled alcoholism sabotaged their brief reunion 224 225 When a disappointed King returned to Chicago Fitzgerald settled into a clandestine relationship with Hollywood gossip columnist Sheilah Graham 223 Throughout their relationship Graham claimed Fitzgerald felt constant guilt over Zelda s mental illness and confinement 226 He repeatedly attempted sobriety had depression had violent outbursts and attempted suicide 227 For the next several years a depressed Scott continued screenwriting on the West Coast and visiting a hospitalized Zelda on the East Coast In April 1939 a coterie from Zelda s mental hospital had planned to go to Cuba but Zelda had missed the trip The Fitzgeralds decided to go on their own The trip proved to be a disaster During this trip spectators at a cockfight beat F Scott Fitzgerald when he tried to intervene against animal cruelty 228 He returned to the United States so exhausted and intoxicated that he required hospitalization 229 The Fitzgeralds never saw each other again 230 I am sorry that there should be nothing to greet you but an empty shell I love you anyway even if there isn t any me or any love or even any life I love you Zelda Fitzgerald Letter to F Scott Fitzgerald December 1940 231 Scott returned to Hollywood in order to pay the ever increasing bills for Zelda s continued hospitalization She made some progress in Asheville and in March 1940 four years after admittance she was discharged to her mother s care 232 She was nearly forty now her friends were long gone and the Fitzgeralds no longer had much money They wrote to each other frequently and they made plans to meet again in December 1940 In a letter Zelda wrote to Fitzgerald shortly before he died of a heart attack she said I am sorry that there should be nothing to greet you but an empty shell I love you anyway even if there isn t any me or any love or even any life I love you 231 Their planned rendezvous did not occur due to Scott s death of occlusive coronary arteriosclerosis at 44 years of age in December 1940 Due to her fragile mental health Zelda could not attend his funeral in Rockville Maryland 233 After Scott s death Zelda read his unfinished manuscript titled The Love of the Last Tycoon She wrote to his friend Edmund Wilson who agreed to edit the book and to eulogize his legacy Zelda believed Scott s work contained an American temperament grounded in belief in oneself and will to survive that Scott s contemporaries had relinquished Scott she insisted had not His work possessed a vitality and stamina because of his indefatigable faith in himself 233 After reading The Last Tycoon Zelda began work on a new novel Caesar s Things As she had missed Scott s funeral due to her mental health she likewise missed Scottie s wedding By August 1943 she returned to the Highland Hospital She worked on her novel while checking in and out of the hospital She did not get better and she did not finish the novel 16 Hospital fire and death edit nbsp Zelda and Scott s current grave in Rockville MarylandTowards the end of her life Zelda resided in and out of sanatoriums Zelda checked back into the hospital in September 1946 and then she returned to live with her mother Minnie in their Alabama home 156 By this point in her life she had undergone over ten years of electroshock therapy and insulin shock treatments 17 18 Consequently she now suffered from severe loss of memory and an apathetic personality due to constant shock therapies 19 Possibly due to these treatments or her deteriorated mental health she espoused fascism as a political ideology 234 According to biographer Nancy Milford Zelda became taken with the idea of fascism as a way of holding everything together of ordering the masses 234 When acquaintance Henry Dan Piper visited Zelda in March 1947 she declared that fascism served to keep things from falling apart and to keep the finer things from being lost or extinguished 234 In November 1947 Zelda returned for the last time to Highland Hospital in Asheville North Carolina 232 Due to insulin treatments her weight ballooned to 130 pounds 235 Acquaintance Edna Garlington Spratt recalled Zelda s grim appearance in the final months before her death She was anything but pretty when I saw her She acted normal but she looked so dreadful Her hair was stringy and she had lost all pride in herself 20 Early in March 1948 her doctors told her she was better and she could leave but she allegedly stayed for further treatment 20 On the night of March 10 1948 a fire broke out in the hospital kitchen Zelda had been sedated and locked in a room on the fifth floor possibly awaiting shock therapy 236 20 The fire moved through the dumbwaiter shaft spreading onto every floor The fire escapes were wooden and they caught fire as well Nine women including Zelda died 16 She was identified by her dental records and according to other reports one of her slippers 237 A follow up investigation raised the unconfirmed possibility that the fire had been a work of arson by Willie Mae a disgruntled or mentally disturbed hospital employee who had initiated the fire in the kitchen 22 20 Zelda and Scott were buried in Rockville Maryland originally in Rockville Cemetery away from his family plot 220 Only one photograph of the original gravesite is known to exist taken in 1970 by Fitzgerald scholar Richard Anderson and published in 2016 At her daughter Scottie s request Zelda and Scott were interred with the other Fitzgeralds at Saint Mary s Catholic Cemetery 220 Inscribed on their tombstone is the final sentence of The Great Gatsby So we beat on boats against the current borne back ceaselessly into the past 238 Critical reappraisal edit nbsp Self portrait watercolor probably painted in the early 1940sAt the time of his third and fatal heart attack in December 1940 her husband Scott Fitzgerald died believing himself to be a failure as a writer 239 Two years later after the United States entrance into World War II an association of publishing executives created the Council on Books in Wartime which distributed 155 000 copies of The Great Gatsby to U S soldiers overseas 240 and the book proved popular among beleaguered troops 241 By 1944 a full scale Fitzgerald revival had occurred 242 Despite the renewed interest in Scott s oeuvre Zelda s death in March 1948 was little noted in the press In 1950 acquaintance and screenwriter Budd Schulberg wrote The Disenchanted with characters based recognizably on the Fitzgeralds who end up as forgotten former celebrities he awash with alcohol and she befuddled by mental illness It was followed in 1951 by Cornell University professor Arthur Mizener s The Far Side of Paradise a biography of F Scott Fitzgerald that rekindled interest in the couple among scholars Mizener s biography was serialized in The Atlantic Monthly and a story about the book appeared in Life magazine Scott was depicted as a fascinating failure Zelda s mental health was largely blamed for his lost potential 243 In 1970 however the history of Zelda and Scott s marriage saw its most profound revision in a book by Nancy Milford a graduate student at Columbia University Zelda A Biography the first book length treatment of Zelda s life became a finalist for the National Book Award and figured for weeks on The New York Times best seller list 23 The book recast Zelda as an artist in her own right whose talents were belittled by a controlling husband Zelda posthumously became an icon of the feminist movement in the 1970s a woman whose unappreciated potential had been suppressed by patriarchal society 244 After the success of Milford s 1970 biography scholars began to view Zelda s work in a new light 24 Prior to Milford s biography scholar Matthew J Bruccoli had written in 1968 that Zelda s novel Save Me the Waltz was worth reading partly because anything that illuminates the career of F Scott Fitzgerald is worth reading and because it is the only published novel of a brave and talented woman who is remembered for her defeats 245 However in the wake of Milford s biography a new perspective emerged 26 and scholar Jacqueline Tavernier Courbin wrote in 1979 Save Me the Waltz is a moving and fascinating novel which should be read on its own terms equally as much as Tender Is the Night It needs no other justification than its comparative excellence 245 After Milford s 1970 biography Save Me the Waltz became the focus of many literary studies that explored different aspects of her work how the novel contrasted with Scott s depiction of their marriage in Tender Is the Night 25 and how the consumer culture that emerged in the 1920s placed stress on modern women 26 nbsp Lauren Bloom as Zelda Fitzgerald and Lance Adell as F Scott Fitzgerald in The Last Flapper a 2006 dramatization of her lifeIn 1991 Zelda s collected writings including Save Me the Waltz were edited by Matthew J Bruccoli and published 246 Reviewing the collection The New York Times literary critic Michiko Kakutani wrote that the novel was written in two months is amazing That for all its flaws it still manages to charm amuse and move the reader is even more remarkable Zelda Fitzgerald succeeded in this novel in conveying her own heroic desperation to succeed at something of her own and she also managed to distinguish herself as a writer with as Edmund Wilson once said of her husband a gift for turning language into something iridescent and surprising 247 In addition to a critical reappraisal of her novel Zelda s artwork also has been reappraised as interesting in its own right After spending much of the 1950s and 1960s in family attics Zelda s mother even had much of the art burned because she disliked it her work drew the renewed interest of scholars 27 Posthumous exhibitions of her watercolors have toured the United States and Europe A review of the exhibition by curator Everl Adair noted the influence of Vincent van Gogh and Georgia O Keeffe on her paintings and concluded that her surviving corpus of art represents the work of a talented visionary woman who rose above tremendous odds to create a fascinating body of work one that inspires us to celebrate the life that might have been 27 Scholars continue to debate the role that Zelda and Scott may have had in inspiring and stifling each other s creativity 248 Biographer Sally Cline wrote that the two camps can be as diametrically opposed as the Plath and Hughes literary camps a reference to the heated controversy about the relationship of husband wife poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath 249 In particular partisan scholars of Zelda frequently depict Scott Fitzgerald as a domineering husband who drove his wife insane 250 In response to this narrative Zelda s daughter Scottie Fitzgerald wrote an essay dispelling such inaccurate interpretations 251 She particularly objected to revisionist depictions of her mother as the classic put down wife whose efforts to express her artistic nature were thwarted by a typically male chauvinist husband 252 In contrast Scottie insisted that my father greatly appreciated and encouraged his wife s unusual talents and ebullient imagination Not only did he arrange for the first showing of her paintings in New York in 1934 he sat through long hours of rehearsals of her one play Scandalabra staged by a Little Theater group in Baltimore he spent many hours editing the short stories she told to College Humor and to Scribner s Magazine 252 Towards the end of her life Scottie wrote a final coda about her parents to a biographer I have never been able to buy the notion that it was my father s drinking which led her to the sanitarium Nor do I think she led him to the drinking 250 Legacy and influence editZelda was the inspiration for Witchy Woman 23 the song of seductive enchantresses written by Don Henley and Bernie Leadon for the Eagles after Henley read Zelda s biography of the muse the partial genius behind her husband F Scott Fitzgerald the wild bewitching mesmerizing quintessential flapper of the Jazz Age 253 Zelda s name served as inspiration for Princess Zelda the eponymous character of The Legend of Zelda series of video games 254 In 2003 a wild turkey which roamed Battery Park in New York City was named Zelda due to a famous episode when during one of her nervous breakdowns she went missing and was found in Battery Park apparently having walked several miles downtown 255 256 In 1989 the F Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald museum opened in Montgomery Alabama The museum is in a house they briefly rented in 1931 and 1932 It is one of the few places where some of Zelda s paintings are kept on display 257 In 1992 Zelda and her daughter Scottie were posthumously inducted into the Alabama Women s Hall of Fame 258 In 2023 Hatteras Sky and Lark Hotels planned three boutique hotels in Asheville North Carolina two of which will have Zelda Fitzgerald themes Zelda Dearest with 20 rooms will have the beauty and optimism of Zelda s early life Zelda Salon named for Gertrude Stein s home in France will have 35 rooms with the design based on where the Fitzgeralds stayed in the 1920s 259 References editNotes edit During a drive along the mountainous roads of the Cote d Azur in France Zelda seized the steering wheel and tried to kill herself her husband and their 9 year old daughter Scottie by driving over a cliff 5 According to Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J Bruccoli Zelda does not say she collaborated on The Beautiful and Damned only that Fitzgerald incorporated a portion of her diary on one page and that he revised scraps of her letters None of Fitzgerald s surviving manuscripts shows her hand 114 Fessenden 2005 argues that Fitzgerald struggled with his sexual orientation 173 In contrast Bruccoli 2002 insists that anyone can be called a latent homosexual but there is no evidence that Fitzgerald was ever involved in a homosexual attachment 164 Citations edit a b c d e f g h Tate 1998 p 85 Fitzgerald 2004 p 46 a b Cline 2002 p 87 They filled their first weeks with antics and the newspapers filled their pages with the Fitzgeralds As enfants terribles they did provoke people but they were never vulgar and often funny so they got away with it a b Curnutt 2004 pp 31 62 Bruccoli 2002 p 131 a b Milford 1970 p 156 Milford 1970 p 156 Stamberg 2013 a b Bruccoli 2002 p 201 One night Fitzgerald woke the Murphys with the report that Zelda had taken an overdose of sleeping pills and they helped him keep her awake It is not clear whether her suicide gesture was related to the Jozan crisis a b Milford 1970 pp 161 387 They did not yet realize the extent of Zelda s breakdown nor the amount of time that it would take to cure her nor even if she could be cured She was diagnosed by Dr Forel as a schizophrenic a b Bruccoli 2002 p 305 After Zelda suffered relapses in the fall of 1930 Dr Paul Eugen Bleuler was called in for a consultation on 22 November He was the leading authority on schizophrenia which he had named Dr Bleuler confirmed Dr Forel s diagnosis and offered as hope that three out of four cases of schizophrenia were curable Stamberg 2013 a b c Bruccoli 2002 pp 327 328 a b c d Bruccoli 2002 pp 343 362 a b Bruccoli 2002 p 343 a b Fitzgerald 1991 p vi According to her daughter Scott Fitzgerald arranged for the first showing of her paintings in New York in 1934 Bruccoli 2002 pp 486 489 a b c d Milford 1970 pp 382 383 a b Cline 2002 p 359 Carroll was pioneering injections of placental blood honey and hypertonic solutions and of horse blood into patients cerebrospinal fluid Horse serum caused aseptic meningitis with vomiting fever and head pains but Carroll used it on Zelda because it could induce long spells of lucidity He also regularly gave Zelda the now standard electro shock and insulin shock treatments disregarding their known effects of memory loss a b Cline 2002 p 286 Zelda was administered insulin shock treatments which were continued for ten years a b Cline 2002 p 351 a b c d e f Smith 2022 Young 1979 Smith 2022 a b Cline 2002 p 402 Willie May Hall claimed she had wanted to start a little trouble to show up the night watchman who had spurned her advances and would get the blame a b c Sandomir 2022 a b Davis 1995 p 327 Tavernier Courbin 1979 p 23 a b Tavernier Courbin 1979 p 22 a b c Davis 1995 p 327 a b c Adair 2005 Alabama Women s Hall of Fame 1992 Milford 1970 p 43 Bruccoli 2002 p 91 a b Tate 1998 p 85 Cline 2002 p 13 Tate 2007 p 373 Levitsky amp Ziblatt 2018 p 111 Kousser 1974 pp 134 137 Warren 2011 Lanahan 1996 p 444 Bate 2021 p 251 Daniel 2021 that Fitzgerald introduced an incestuous rape into the plot of Tender is the Night at the end of 1931 because Zelda might have been raped by her father Judge Anthony Sayre Tate 1998 p 59 Tate 1998 p 85 Milford 1970 p 3 a b Bruccoli Smith amp Kerr 2003 p 38 National Archives 2016 a b Milford 1970 pp 3 4 Milford 1970 p 5 Davis 1924 pp 45 56 59 Bowers 1929 p 310 The Montgomery Advertiser 1960 p 4 Svrluga 2016 Hauser 2022 Holthouse 2008 Upchurch 2004 a b Wagner Martin 2004 p 24 a b Cline 2002 p 13 Wagner Martin 2004 p 24 Bruccoli 2002 pp 189 437 Turnbull 1962 p 111 Zelda was no housekeeper Sketchy about ordering meals she completely ignored the laundry a b Milford 1970 pp 9 13 Wagner Martin 2004 p 211 a b c Milford 1970 pp 16 17 Cline 2002 pp 23 25 37 Milford 1970 p 22 Milford 1970 p 32 Mizener 1951 p 70 Mizener 1951 p 70 a b Bruccoli 2002 pp 80 82 Fitzgerald wished to die in battle and he hoped that his unpublished novel would become a great success in the wake of his death Tate 1998 pp 6 32 Bruccoli 2002 pp 79 82 a b West 2005 pp 65 66 a b c d Milford 1970 pp 33 34 a b c d e Turnbull 1962 p 102 Bruccoli 2002 p 122 Milford 1970 p 32 Cline 2002 p 65 Bruccoli 2002 p 95 Fitzgerald amp Fitzgerald 2002 p 96 Fitzgerald 1920 p 304 a b Fitzgerald 1991 p vii According to her daughter Scottie the tombstones in the Confederate Cemetery at Oakwood was her favorite place to be when she felt quite alone Turnbull 1962 p 102 As they lingered among the headstones of the Confederate dead Zelda said Fitzgerald would never understand how she felt about those graves West 2005 pp 67 68 Bruccoli 2002 p 86 West 2005 p 73 Bruccoli 2002 p 111 West 2005 p 73 Bruccoli 2002 p 89 Milford 1970 pp 35 36 Bruccoli 2002 p 89 Fitzgerald amp Fitzgerald 2002 pp 314 315 By your own admission many years after and for which I have never reproached you you had been seduced and provincially outcast I sensed this the night we slept together first for you re a poor bluffer Turnbull 1962 p 70 It seemed on one March 1916 afternoon that I had lost every single thing I wanted and that night was the first time I hunted down the spectre of womanhood that for a little while makes everything else seem unimportant Bruccoli 2002 p 91 Fitzgerald wrote on December 4 1918 My mind is firmly made up that I will not shall not can not should not must not marry Bruccoli 2002 p 91 Mizener 1951 pp 85 89 90 Zelda would question whether he was ever going to make enough money for them to marry and Fitzgerald was thus compelled to prove that he was rich enough for her Milford 1970 pp 35 36 a b c Bruccoli 2002 p 109 Cline 2002 p 73 Milford 1970 p 42 Turnbull 1962 p 92 Tate 1998 p 82 Unwilling to wait while Fitzgerald succeeded in the advertisement business and unwilling to live on his small salary Zelda broke their engagement Milford 1970 p 52 When everything in New York had failed him his career and his writing he turned to Zelda with a proposal of immediate marriage It was an effort on Scott s part to redeem at least a fraction of his dreams for success and happiness but Zelda must have felt it to be founded in failure and she could not accept marriage on that basis Bruccoli 2002 pp 95 96 Fitzgerald 1966 p 108 Turnbull 1962 pp 93 94 a b Bruccoli 2002 p 96 a b c Bruccoli 2002 p 97 Milford 1970 p 55 West 2005 pp 65 74 95 Fitzgerald 1945 p 86 Bruccoli 2002 p 99 Milford 1970 p 57 Turnbull 1962 p 105 Bruccoli 2002 p 128 Bruccoli 2002 p 479 Fitzgerald wrote in 1939 You Zelda submitted at the moment of our marriage when your passion for me was at as low ebb as mine for you I never wanted the Zelda I married I didn t love you again till after you became pregnant Turnbull 1962 p 102 Victory was sweet though not as sweet as it would have been six months earlier before Zelda had rejected him Fitzgerald couldn t recapture the thrill of their first love Bruccoli 2002 p 437 In July 1938 Fitzgerald wrote to his daughter that I decided to marry your mother after all even though I knew she was spoiled and meant no good to me I was sorry immediately I had married her but being patient in those days made the best of it Bruccoli 2002 p 129 Describing his marriage to Zelda Fitzgerald said that aside from long conversations late at night their relations lacked a closeness which they never achieved in the workaday world of marriage a b c Turnbull 1962 p 110 Mizener 1972 p 28 Ginevra gave substance to an ideal Fitzgerald would cling to for a lifetime to the end of his days the thought of her could bring tears to his eyes Stevens 2003 Noden 2003 Corrigan 2014 p 58 a b c Graham amp Frank 1958 p 180 a b c d e f g Graham amp Frank 1958 p 242 Bruccoli 2002 pp 131 32 Bruccoli 2002 p xxv Wagner Martin 2004 p 24 Bruccoli 2002 pp 139 189 437 Turnbull 1962 p 111 a b c Graham amp Frank 1958 p 241 Milford 1970 p 95 a b Fitzgerald amp Fitzgerald 2002 p xxvii Introduction a b c d e f g Bruccoli 2002 p 143 Cline 2002 p 108 a b Cline 2002 p 111 Curnutt 2004 p 32 Tate 1998 p 85 Mizener 1951 p 63 Milford 1970 p 84 Mizener 1951 p 63 Bruccoli 2002 p 166 a b c d e f Tate 1998 p 86 Fitzgerald 1966 pp 355 356 Milford 1970 p 89 a b Fitzgerald amp Fitzgerald 2002 pp xxvii viii Tate 1998 p 14 The review was partly a joke a b c d Fitzgerald 1991 p vi Bruccoli 2002 p 162 Conor 2004 p 209 More than any other type of the Modern Woman it was the Flapper who embodied the scandal which attached to women s new public visibility from their increasing street presence to their mechanical reproduction as spectacles Conor 2004 pp 210 221 Fitzgerald 1945 p 16 Echoes of the Jazz Age The flappers if they get about at all know the taste of gin or corn at sixteen Fitzgerald 1945 pp 14 15 Echoes of the Jazz Age Unchaperoned young people of the smaller cities had discovered the mobile privacy of that automobile given to young Bill at sixteen to make him self reliant At first petting was a desperate adventure even under such favorable conditions but presently confidences were exchanged and the old commandment broke down a b Milford 1970 pp 91 92 Bruccoli 2002 p 158 Curnutt 2004 p 31 Bruccoli 2002 p 158 a b Milford 1970 p 88 Turnbull 1962 p 140 Mizener 1951 pp 155 156 Bruccoli 2002 p 185 Fitzgerald 1945 p 21 Pollak 2015 p MB2 a b Bruccoli 2002 p xxvi Fitzgerald 1945 p 272 Tate 1998 p 86 Bruccoli 2002 p 195 Milford 1970 pp 108 112 a b c Bruccoli 2002 p 195 Tate 1998 p 86 It is impossible to determine whether the affair was consummated a b Milford 1970 pp 108 112 a b Milford 1970 pp 108 112 Bruccoli 2002 pp 195 196 Tate 1998 p 86 Bruccoli 2002 p 195 Fitzgerald told Sheilah Graham that he had fought a duel with Jozan Tate 1998 p 86 Zelda became romantically interested in Edouard a French naval aviator It is impossible to determine whether the affair was consummated but it was nevertheless a damaging breach of trust Bruccoli 2002 pp 195 196 a b c Bruccoli 2002 p 196 Milford 1970 pp 108 112 114 Mizener 1951 p 164 Milford 1970 p 112 Fitzgerald amp Perkins 1971 p 87 Bruccoli 2002 pp 206 207 Milford 1970 p 113 Milford 1970 p 122 Milford 1970 Bruccoli 2002 p 226 Hemingway 1964 p 186 a b Hemingway 1964 p 190 Hemingway 1964 pp 180 181 Bruccoli 2002 pp 437 468 469 She wanted me to work too much for her and not enough for my dream Turnbull 1962 pp 116 280 Mizener 1951 p 270 a b Milford 1970 p 380 a b Hemingway 1964 p 155 Hemingway 1964 p 176 Usher 2014 p 230 Fessenden 2005 p 33 Fitzgerald amp Fitzgerald 2002 p 65 Bruccoli 2002 p 275 Zelda extended her attack on Fitzgerald s masculinity by charging that he was involved in a homosexual liaison with Hemingway Milford 1970 p 183 a b c Bruccoli 2002 p 275 Fessenden 2005 p 28 Fitzgerald s career records the ambient dogging pressure to repel charges of his own homosexuality a b Bruccoli 2002 p 284 According to Bruccoli author Robert McAlmon and other contemporaries in Paris publicly asserted that Fitzgerald was a homosexual and Hemingway later avoided Fitzgerald due to these rumors Milford 1970 p 154 Kerr 1996 p 417 Fessenden 2005 p 28 Biographers describe Fay as a fin de siecle aesthete of considerable appeal a dandy always heavily perfumed who introduced the teenage Fitzgerald to Oscar Wilde and good wine Fessenden 2005 p 28 Bruccoli 2002 p 275 If Fay was a homosexual as has been asserted without proof Fitzgerald was presumably unaware of it Fessenden 2005 p 30 Mizener 1951 p 57 In February he put on his Show Girl make up and went to a Psi U dance at the University of Minnesota with his old friend Gus Schurmeier as escort He spent the evening casually asking for cigarettes in the middle of the dance floor and absent mindedly drawing a small vanity case from the top of a blue stocking Fessenden 2005 pp 32 33 Bruccoli 2002 pp 275 277 Milford 1970 p 117 Fitzgerald amp Fitzgerald 2002 p 57 Turnbull 1962 p 352 a b Bruccoli 2002 p xxvii Buller 2005 p 9 Bruccoli 2002 p 256 Turnbull 1962 p 352 Buller 2005 pp 6 8 Wilson 2007 p 311 a b c Milford 1970 pp 135 138 Milford 1970 p 141 Fitzgerald 1991 p vi According to their daughter Scott was even in favor of her ballet lessons he paid for them after all until dancing became a twenty four hour preoccupation which was destroying her physical and mental health a b Tate 1998 pp 86 87 283 a b Milford 1970 pp 141 157 Bruccoli 2002 pp 288 289 Milford 1970 p 156 Tate 1998 pp 87 88 283 Ludwig 1995 p 181 a b c d e f g Tate 1998 pp 87 88 283 a b Milford 1970 p 179 Stamberg 2013 Kramer 1996 p 106 Graham amp Frank 1958 pp 242 243 a b Bruccoli 2002 p 320 Tate 1998 pp 87 88 283 a b c Bruccoli 2002 p 320 Milford 1970 pp 209 212 Fitzgerald amp Fitzgerald 2002 p 145 Milford 1970 p 213 Fitzgerald amp Fitzgerald 2002 p 156 a b c d e f Berg 1978 pp 235 236 Fitzgerald amp Fitzgerald 2002 p 163 Berg 1978 p 236 a b Fitzgerald amp Fitzgerald 2002 p 164 Fitzgerald amp Fitzgerald 2002 p 163 Berg 1978 pp 237 251 Fitzgerald 1991 p 9 Fitzgerald 1966 p 262 Berg 1978 p 250 She has some mighty bad tricks of writing but she is now getting over the worst of them a b Berg 1978 p 251 Bruccoli 2002 p xxviii a b c d e Mencken 1989 pp 44 45 Mencken 1989 p 56 Cline 2002 p 320 Milford 1970 p 264 Fitzgerald amp Fitzgerald 2002 p 207 Tavernier Courbin 1979 pp 31 33 Bruccoli 2002 p 328 Tavernier Courbin 1979 p 36 Tavernier Courbin 1979 p 40 a b c Milford 1970 pp 262 263 a b c d e f g h Graham amp Frank 1958 pp 243 244 Bruccoli 2002 p 345 a b Bruccoli 2002 p 362 a b c Tate 1998 p 88 Milford 1970 p 290 a b Milford 1970 p 308 a b Milford 1970 pp 311 313 Corrigan 2014 p 59 Smith 2003 p E1 Noden 2003 MacKie 1970 pp 17 Commenting upon his alcoholism Fitzgerald s romantic acquaintance Elizabeth Beckwith MacKie stated the author was the victim of a tragic historic accident the accident of Prohibition when Americans believed that the only honorable protest against a stupid law was to break it Graham amp Frank 1958 p 308 The day came when he realized he was drinking to escape not only to escape the growing sense of his wasted potentialities but also to dull the guilt he felt over Zelda I feel that I am responsible for what happened to her I could no longer bear what became of her Graham amp Frank 1958 pp 255 257 275 281 296 309 Turnbull 1962 pp 298 299 Mizener 1951 p 283 Milford 1970 p 327 Milford 1970 p 329 Curnutt 2004 p 43 a b Bush 1965 p 67 a b Tate 1998 p 284 a b Milford 1970 pp 350 353 a b c Milford 1970 pp 379 381 411 Zelda was taken with the idea of Fascism as a way of holding everything together of ordering the masses She told Piper she joined every organization she could to keep things from falling apart and to keep the finer things from being lost or extinguished Milford 1970 p 907 Cline 2002 p 400 Young 1979 Mangum 2016 pp 27 39 Mizener 1951 p 300 Cole 1984 p 26 One hundred fifty five thousand ASE copies of The Great Gatsby were distributed as against the twenty five thousand copies of the novel printed by Scribners between 1925 and 1942 Wittels 1945 Mizener 1960 Prigozy 2002 pp 15 18 Prigozy 2002 pp 18 21 a b Tavernier Courbin 1979 p 23 Fitzgerald 1991 Kakutani 1991 p 15 Prigozy 2002 pp 227 233 Cline 2002 p 6 a b Fitzgerald amp Fitzgerald 2002 p xxix Fitzgerald amp Fitzgerald 2002 pp xxix v a b Fitzgerald 1991 p v Tate 2007 p 6 Ryan 2017 Graham amp Frank 1958 pp 243 244 The two men set out in search of her They found her in Central Park digging a grave in which to bury Scott s pants Carlson 2012 Carlson 2014 Newton 2005 Alabama Women s Hall of Fame Inductees 2005 Hofmann Will August 21 2023 New Asheville boutique hotels focus on Zelda Fitzgerald s history Asheville Citizen Times Works cited edit Primary sources edit Fitzgerald F Scott 2004 Bruccoli Matthew J Baughman Judith eds Conversations with F Scott Fitzgerald Jackson Mississippi University of Mississippi Press ISBN 1 57806 604 2 via Google Books Perkins Maxwell 1971 Kuehl John Bryer Jackson R eds Dear Scott Dear Max The Fitzgerald Perkins Correspondence New York Charles Scribner s Sons ISBN 978 0 684 12373 8 LCCN 76 143940 via Internet Archive Fitzgerald Zelda 2002 Bryer Jackson R Barks Cathy W eds Dear Scott Dearest Zelda The Love Letters of F Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald New York St Martin s Press ISBN 978 1 9821 1713 9 via Internet Archive 1945 Wilson Edmund ed The Crack Up New York New Directions ISBN 0 8112 0051 5 via Internet Archive July 1966 January 1940 Turnbull Andrew ed The Letters of F Scott Fitzgerald New York Charles Scribner s Sons via Internet Archive April 1920 This Side of Paradise New York Charles Scribner s Sons via Internet Archive Fitzgerald Zelda 1991 Bruccoli Matthew J ed The Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald New York Charles Scribner s Sons ISBN 0 684 19297 7 via Internet Archive Graham Sheilah Frank Gerold 1958 Beloved Infidel The Education of a Woman New York Henry Holt and Company LCCN 58 14130 via Internet Archive Hemingway Ernest 1964 A Moveable Feast New York Charles Scribner s Sons ISBN 978 0 7432 3729 1 LCCN 64 15441 via Internet Archive Lanahan Eleanor 1996 1994 Scottie the Daughter of The Life of Frances Scott Fitzgerald Lanahan Smith New York HarperCollins via Internet Archive MacKie Elizabeth Beckwith 1970 Bruccoli Matthew J ed My Friend Scott Fitzgerald Fitzgerald Hemingway Annual Columbia South Carolina University of South Carolina Press pp 16 27 via Internet Archive Mencken H L 1989 Fecher Charles A ed The Diary of H L Mencken New York Alfred A Knopf ISBN 0 394 56877 X via Internet Archive Usher Shaun 2014 Letters of Note An 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York Random House ISBN 978 1 4000 6308 6 via Internet Archive Young Perry Deane January 14 1979 This Side of Rockville The Washington Post Washington D C retrieved December 18 2022Online sources edit Alabama Women s Hall of Fame Inductees Alabama Women s Hall of Fame Montgomery Alabama State of Alabama 2005 archived from the original on December 2 2022 retrieved January 14 2023 American Slavery Civil Records National Archives and Records Administration Washington D C August 15 2016 archived from the original on January 9 2023 retrieved January 14 2023 Carlson Jen October 9 2014 RIP Zelda The Turkey Of Battery Park Gothamist New York City archived from the original on October 10 2014 retrieved June 5 2013 October 30 2012 Zelda The Wild Turkey Of Battery Park Survived The Storm Gothamist New York City archived from the original on October 11 2014 retrieved June 5 2013 Holthouse David November 30 2008 Activists Confront Hate in Selma Ala Intelligence Report Montgomery Alabama Southern 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C archived from the original on July 25 2022 retrieved January 14 2023 Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald 1900 1948 Alabama Women s Hall of Fame Montgomery Alabama State of Alabama 1992 archived from the original on February 4 2003 retrieved January 14 2023External links editListen to this article 43 minutes source source nbsp This audio file was created from a revision of this article dated 19 September 2011 2011 09 19 and does not reflect subsequent edits Audio help More spoken articles nbsp Media related to Zelda Fitzgerald at Wikimedia Commons Works by or about Zelda Fitzgerald at Internet Archive Zelda Fitzgerald Encyclopedia of Alabama Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Zelda Fitzgerald amp oldid 1184676156, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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