R.E. Slater - On Sunday (Poetic Haikus)

 

On Sunday

*Haikus are 3-verse Japanese compositions

consisting of a 5-7-5 syllabic structure

"The sun hurts my eyes;

a big fir stands behind me

awaiting audience."

A day we may rest

read, sleep, play, or contemplate

reviving holy faith.

Hearing children laugh

playing nearby grassy beach

bring fond memories.

The lake's fresh breeze

revive my spirit's center

refilling spent life.

A lazy dog barks;

I half-open a sleepy eye

falling back asleep.

Feeling the hot breeze

a book page flutters forward

like new days passing.

We rise up to leave

Sunday restfully passed

stengthened, inspired.

- RE Slater

Sunday, August 14, 2023

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

all rights reserved

Requiem by Robert Louis Stevenson

Poetotopia

https://poemotopia.com/robert-louis-stevenson/requiem/

Requiem by Robert Louis Stevenson

by Poemotopia Editors

“Requiem” is engraved, as directed by Robert Louis Stevenson, on his grave. Stevenson died suddenly on 3 December 1894 when he was talking with his wife. He collapsed after uttering two words “What’s that?” Within a few hours, he vanished into non-entity at the age of 44. Before his death, he wished the lines of this poem to be engraved on his tombstone. The most iconic lines of this piece include:

Here he lies where he longed to be;

Home is the sailor, home from sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

Summary

The poem “Requiem” is about a wish of the poet R.L. Stevenson concerning where he should be laid after his death. He describes the wide sky, lit with several stars. His wish is to lie beneath such a glorious sky. He has lived gladly. So he wants to gladly embrace death. It is not that death will be victorious over him. He laid himself down with a will, a determination of death. After his death, he wants a few lines to be sung commemorating him. These lines feature a “home” that is compared to a “sailor” and “hunter”. While death is represented as “sea” and “hill”.

Meaning

The title of the poem "Requiem" means "an act or token of remembrance." This poem is a remembrancer of the poet that he left behind for his dear readers. Besides, the term also means a Mass for the repose of the souls of the dead.

So, Stevenson wrote this piece for two purposes. One is to make him memorable in the minds of his readers as a “sailor” or a “hunter” (in their metaphorical sense). Another reason concerns how he wants to be remembered. He does not want to die like a person defeated by death. Rather his wish is to be reminded of as a person who accepted death wholeheartedly.

Form, Rhyme Scheme, and Meter

This poem consists of two stanzas. Each stanza has four rhyming lines. The rhyme scheme of the overall piece is AAAB CCCB. It means the first and last line rhymes together.

In the first quatrain, the first three lines end with a similar rhyme (“sky”, “lie”, and “die”). The same applies to the first three lines of the second quatrain ("me", "be", and "sea").

Regarding the meter, each line consists of eight syllables except the second line, which consists of seven syllables. In most cases, the stress falls on the second syllable of each foot. Thus, the poem is composed in iambic tetrameter with a few variations.

Let’s have a look at the metrical scheme of the first stanza:

8    Un-der/ the wide/ and star/-ry sky,

7        Dig/ the grave/ and let/ me lie.

8    Glad/ did I live/ and glad/-ly die,

8        And I laid/ me down/ with a will.

8    This be the verse you grave for me:

7        'Here he lies where he longed to be;

8    Home is the sailor, home from sea,

8        And the hunter home from the hill.'

Literary Devices & Figurative Language

Stevenson uses the following literary devices in his poem “Requiem”:

Alliteration:

The repetition of similar sounds in neighboring words can be found in “starry sky”, “dig the”, “let me lie”, “Here he”, and “hunter home”.

Inversion:

It occurs in “Glad did I live and gladly die”. Here, the regular sentence pattern is reversed.

Metaphor:

In the last two lines, Stevenson metaphorically compares death to a “sea” and a “hill”. While he compares himself to a “sailor” and a “hunter”. As a sailor longs for the sea, so does the poet.

Repetition:

There is a repetition of the word “glad” in the third line. In the last two lines, he repeats the word “home” thrice. It is meant for the sake of emphasis.

Line-by-Line Analysis & Explanation

Lines 1-4

Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie.

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.

Stevenson’s “Requiem” begins with visual imagery. The poet depicts a beautiful wide sky, lit with stars. Such a sky is a symbolic representation of glory. In the following line, the poet orders his grave to be dug under such a sky. His tone is peaceful and welcoming. He does not fear death. Rather he says, “let me lie”.

According to him, he lived happily. So, why can he be sad at his death? As he lived, he wants to die peacefully, with a smile on his face. If anyone thinks that he is mentally defeated by death. It is not the case.

In the following line, he remarks that he laid his body down. He does it with a will, a determination engendering directly from his heart. His soul cannot be defeated. Even if he dies, he will live through the variety of works he created during his lifetime. This poetic “will” displays his unrelenting attitude.

Lines 5-8

This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be;

Home is the sailor, home from sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

In the final quatrain, the poet writes the verse that should be graved as his epitaph. Besides, the term “grave” means to fix indelibly in the mind. So, the lines he writes should be engraved in his readers’ minds. When they think about the poet, they should visualize him in the way he wants.

He points at this grave and tells readers that it is the place he longed to lie in. He does not fear death or the cold grave. In the following lines, he gives the reason for thinking so.

According to him, “home is the sailor”. Here, he compares himself to a sailor. This body is his second home and the “sea” symbolizes his permanent place. Like a sailor cannot live without voyaging on the sea, the poet longs for the metaphorical “sea” death.

In the following lines, he uses another analogy of a “hunter” and “himself”. A hunter is never happy staying at home. He becomes restless for hunting. When he goes to the hill, he becomes happy and fulfilled. Likewise, the poet is going to be happy when he leaves his mortal home and goes up the “hill”. This “hill” is a symbolic reference to heaven or eternal life. Only death can help him to reach there. Hence, he accepts death with all his heart.

Historical Background

The first draft of “Requiem” was composed in 1880. In 1879, Stevenson was near death when he arrived in Monterey, California. By December, he had recovered his health and traveled to San Francisco, California. But by the end of the winter, he was so ill that he found himself at death’s door. This experience made him write this poem. He mentioned his tombstone and epitaph in a letter of February 1880. Stevenson always wanted his poem “Requiem” inscribed in his tomb. After his death, on 3 December 1894, he was buried at Mount Vaea. The lines were inscribed on his tombstone thereafter.

Questions & Answers

What is Robert Louis Stevenson’s grave epitaph?

In 1879, Stevenson went to California to marry Fanny Osbourne. His health was broken there and he found himself extremely close to death. It led him to think about his death and he wrote the poem “Requiem” as an epitaph for his grave. He wanted these lines to be inscribed on his tomb.

What is the poem “Requiem” about?

The poem “Requiem” is about the poet’s final wish. Through this poem, he describes how he wants to be remembered after his death. He also specifies the location where he wants to be buried.

When was “Requiem” by Robert Louis Stevenson written?

Stevenson wrote this poem in 1880 when he was in California.

Where was Robert Louis Stevenson buried?

Stevenson was buried at Mount Vaea, located in Samoa. He lived the last four years of his life on the east side of Mount Vaea and chose the mountain top as his final resting place.

What type of poem is “Requiem”?

It is a lyric poem written in a regular rhyme scheme. The first-person speaker (Stevenson) talks about his final wish in this poem.

Explore More of RLS's Writings

• R. L. Stevenson Poems“The Vagabond”
• “Winter-Time”
• “The Wind”
• “Windy Nights”

External Resources

• About “Requiem” — Read more about the poem and explore a short sketch on the poet’s life.

• Dating of “Requiem” — Learn about the date of composition and the historical background of the poem.

• About Robert Louis Stevenson — Read about the poet’s life and his works.

• Poet Profile & Poems of R. L. Stevenson — Learn more about the poet and explore more of his poems

• Gravesite of RL Stevenson - https://chasingabandon.com/visiting-robert-louis-stevenson-museum-apia-samoa/

R.E. Slater - Sadness

Sadness

by R.E. Slater

¹This be the verse you grave for me:

   'Here he lies where he long'd to be;
   'Home is the sailor, home from sea,
   'And the hunter home from the hill.'

My sadness comes upon the wings of  thanksgiving;

Yet it is a heavy sadness which grips me

One which cannot be undone --

Nor should it be undone --

Fallen upon my heart and soul.

Which are it's proper resting place,

   Carried o'er many years past,

   Across many life events fled,

   Both the very good and very bad,

But, on balance, good... but bad too,

In so many important ways to me.

Memories that are now 'Nevermore,'

As the harkey ²poet once said,

Unlike my present precious memories

These older memories rest deeper inside,
   Here is where I miss the old faces,

   their bright eyes,
   their voices and laughter,
   their jocularity, teases and reflections,

   met in somber moments of wisdom and pain --

Of all that we shared together when together

When working farm or field or vegetable garden;

When hunting or travelling together,

Of the family picnics at grandma's nextdoor --

Yea, all, all, all gone --

Nevermore and nevermore and nevermore.

This kind of wistful sadness

Comes from living with those you love.

Not only family but uncles and aunts,
And friends who once became family,

Wandering into our lives, then wandering out....

Of places lived during youth and afterwards,

Places and events which mature us,

Test us, prove us, upon the high tides

And heavy seas sometimes calm and sometimes not.

At once the years of sorrow are completed

But never gone, completed in a strange way

Never to be reclaimed as they were claimed

Living in their moments of dred or charm.

Sadly remembered their irrepeatable natures,

That even before leaving they had already left --

   My grandparents on their farm,

   My long heritage now past with them,

   The wild lands I walked unencumbered,

   Before roads and businesses and commissions.

All now recycled in updated ways of memory,

Irrevocable life stages and events,

Piling one on top of the other, until,
When looking back as an older man,

All the beautiful moments have twinkled out,

Running together likes paints on a canvas,

Beheld their special memories,

...Memories that are no longer.

Sadly, they cannot be rewound,

Nor undone, nor relived, nor prevented,

Nor even held as they once were,
But lie as remembered experiences,
As wonderous beautiful moments flying by,

Of home and family then and now,

Now lying still in the moment, collecting dust,

Once nurturing, energizing, flowing with newness.
   Even so Lord, 'Thank you for the many good moments,
   And 'deliverance from the bad moments' --

   Those which pained me, harmed me, changed me,

   From who I was to who I am today as a

   Patient, if not enduring, survivor of life's

   Many changeable moods and attires.

May the mundane and unremarkable

Never quit our spirits restlessly alive,

For it is in these common moments

Where everlasting life everlastingly abides.

Binding event to event, as the moments fly,

As a series of crescendoing waves upon the ear,

Spilling across the soul and out upon the shoals,

From shoreline to shoreline

Before lifting the sails to ship out again --

   To never-ending encounters, relationships,

   Words, deeds, actions, calamities, traumas, pain...

   Criss-crossing life's flowing seas beautiful and hard.

'Yea, Lord, help us to become good sailors,

Masters who sail life's many uneven, flowing tides,

Learning to steer fair or foul towards home;

To become hunters of the hills we know and love,

Building the kind of home we yearn, need and know.

   To be true in our hearts as we know

   Our hearts to be true --

   Caretakes of those we meet, however short,

   Or long, mentoring future sailors of the seas

   Or hunters crossing hills and dales

   To not weary the task nor succumb

   Our frail hearts its griefs and sorrows.'

Amen and Amen and Amen

R.E. Slater
July 2, 2023

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

all rights reserved

*Two References:

1Under the wide and starry sky,

    Dig the grave and let me lie.

Glad did I live and gladly die,

    And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:

    'Here he lies where he longed to be;

Home is the sailor, home from sea,

    And the hunter home from the hill.'

- Requiem, by Robert Louis Stevenson

2Edgar Allen Poe, 'The Raven"

Zelda Fitzgerald

ZELDA FITZGERALD

          

         

* * * * * * * *

Zelda Fitgerald and F.Scott Fitzgerald. Their marriage
was flawed but deeply loving. Photograph: Alamy

The Tragic, fascinating, brilliant – life

of ‘wild child’ Zelda Fitzgerald revisited

article link

Two films and a TV series out soon portray the life

of the jazz-age writer and wife of F Scott Fitzgerald

by Sarah Hughes

Sat 29 Oct 2016 19.04 EDT

She is thought of as the original wild child, a pearl-twirling party girl who died at the age of 47 after a fire broke out in the North Carolina sanatorium where she was a patient. Now Zelda Fitzgerald, the southern belle turned jazz-age heroine, dubbed “the first American flapper” by her husband and partner-in-drink Scott, is to have her own Hollywood make-over – two films are in the pipeline and a television series will air on Amazon Prime early next year.

All three projects have starry names attached: Jennifer Lawrence will take the lead in Zelda, a biopic directed by Ron Howard and based on Nancy Milford’s best-selling biography; Scarlett Johansson will bob her hair for The Beautiful and The Damned; and Christina Ricci will play the young and impetuous Zelda in the Amazon series Z: The Beginning of Everything. The title of the TV series comes from Scott’s awestruck comment on meeting Zelda: “I love her, and that’s the beginning and end of everything.”

So what is it about Zelda that fascinates almost 70 years after her tragic end? In part it is that the upheavals the couple lived through find an echo in our own tumultuous times.

“Interest in the Fitzgeralds has definitely been on the increase – not only since Baz Luhrmann’s film of The Great Gatsby in 2013 but also from the many parallels between their lives and work and the period we’re living through right now,” says Sarah Churchwell, author of the critically acclaimed Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and The Invention of the Great Gatsby.

“It’s a story of boom and bust and it resonates as we are grappling with our own boom and bust, our own worries about the cost of our excesses and our own social failures. The lives and fortunes of Scott and Zelda peculiarly mimicked their eras: in the 1920s they were roaring for all they were worth, but with the crash in 1929, everything fell apart.”

It helps, too, that Zelda was so vibrant a figure. “It begins with her beauty,” says Churchwell. “But also with the stories told in the 1920s about the high jinks and fun she and Scott seemed to have. People really liked her: she was surprising, intelligent, shrewd, funny and loved a good party. She also liked to be the centre of attention, and so had her detractors too. These things combined to make her a legend.”

Scott repeatedly returned to their relationship in his fiction, most notably in his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, which details the heady early days of their marriage; and his melancholy fourth, Tender Is The Night, in which the gilded dream has faded into a more tawdry reality. Zelda’s only novel, Save Me The Waltz, presented the relationship from her side.

They were arguably America’s first celebrity pairing: a carefree golden couple who wrote their way into the spotlight, creating their own mythology of gin-soaked days and fun-filled nights, only to linger too long once the light had started to dim. “Their recklessness makes the story exciting and dramatic,” says Churchwell. “But they paid a very high price.”

After a few giddy years, all the youthful promise crumbled away, leaving Scott a dazed and drunk jobbing hack in Hollywood and bringing Zelda to breakdown at the age of 30, a diagnosis of schizophrenia, now widely thought to be a bipolar disorder, and a life in and out of sanatoriums.

“Her story is both fascinating and tragic,” says Therese Anne Fowler, on whose novel Z the Amazon series is based. “Here we have a woman whose talents and energy and intellect should have made her a brilliant success, who was determined to be an accomplished artist, writer and ballet dancer in an era where married women were supposed to be wives and mothers, period. Her devotion to Scott was, in many ways, her undoing [although] he was just as imprisoned as she was. Had they loved each other less, they might both have come to better ends.”

The idea of Zelda as a brilliant woman trapped by her time has gained traction in recent years, with a number of works re-evaluating her through the prism of feminism – although it is not always the easiest of fits. As early as 1974, the couple’s daughter Scottie resisted such claims, writing that attempts to view her mother as a “classic ‘put-down’ wife, whose efforts to express her nature were thwarted by a typically male chauvinist husband” were not accurate.

Writing in the New Yorker in 2013, Molly Fischer agreed, noting: “Saving Zelda Fitzgerald is no easy proposition...[she] does not want to be anyone’s pet, and there’s something disconcerting about the literary readiness to domesticate her, to transform an exasperating woman into an appealing heroine.”

The new films may well further “Hollywoodise” Zelda, sanding away her rough edges and reinventing her as a relatable heroine for our modern times. The casting of Lawrence – so often described as “America’s Sweetheart” – in the Howard biopic is no accident.

A report about the upcoming Johansson film in the Hollywood Reporter suggested it would draw on previously unreleased material to “indicate that her husband misappropriated his wife’s ideas as his own”.

Mark Gill, president of Millennium Films, the production company behind The Beautiful and The Damned, agrees: “She was massively ahead of her time and she took a beating for it. He stole her ideas and put them in his books. The marriage was a codependency from hell with a jazz-age soundtrack.” The film has, however, secured the co-operation of the Fitzgerald estate.

Fowler agrees that there is a growing tendency to apply our own concerns to Zelda. “We do anoint her as a kind of proto-feminist heroine, even though she didn’t see herself as a feminist and didn’t fully succeed at anything,” she says. “But her original reputation is based on conventional paternalistic standards of what a woman, mother and wife ought to be and do. Her ambitions and her insistence on pursuing them were considered inappropriate and unhealthy; after her psychotic break she was literally told that this insistence had created her ‘split mind’ and that the path to a cure lay in giving up all ambitions that didn’t conform to the paternalistic ideal.”

Scarlett Johansson, Jennifer Lawrence and Christina Ricci are all set to play

Zelda Fitzgerald in the forthcoming productions The Beautiful and the Damned,

Zelda and, Z: The Beginning of Everything.  |  Composite: Getty Images

The backlash against this image is understandable given that popular opinion of Zelda was initially driven by Ernest Hemingway’s notoriously caustic descriptions in A Moveable Feast, published posthumously in 1964, in which he dismissed her as insane and blamed Scott’s growing dependence on drink on his wife.

“Our perception has very much changed,” says Churchwell. “We have come to sympathise with her frustration, to recognise her gifts and to be more fair-minded about her choices.” That said, she cautions against attempts to create a Team Scott/Team Zelda divide, as is so often the case in famous literary partnerships. “It’s important to say that they always loved each other and wouldn’t have appreciated people taking sides… Fitzgerald wrote a few years before he died that it was a ‘moral imperative’ that their friends understood they were a couple, a unit and would stay that way, even if her illness meant they couldn’t live together.”

Churchwell is also scathing about attempts to suggest Zelda had a larger role in her husband’s work than previously presumed. “There are people who want to credit Zelda with Scott’s work, which is just silly and doesn’t do women any favours,” she says. “It’s not a zero-sum game: we can recognise both of them for who they were.

“Zelda had many talents, but where writing was concerned she was probably too ill when she started to hone her gifts, and while it is true that Scott didn’t particularly want her to write – partly out of territoriality but partly because her doctors told him it was bad for her – it’s also true that her work isn’t in the same class as his…. Her individual sentences are often lovely, and she can create a mood and has clever turns of phrase but her works tend to be sketches rather than full stories. If they had made different choices, maybe she could have been an important writer, but the reality is that she wasn’t.”

Perhaps, then, the true key to Zelda’s continued pull on our imagination lies not in her work but in her modernity. “I don’t want to live – I want to love first and live incidentally,” she proclaimed and it is that vitality and greed for all of life’s experiences, both good and bad, that stretches down over the decades, allowing each generation to see something new.

Z: The Beginning of Everything will air on Amazon Prime early next year

THEY SAID …

‘I have rarely known a woman who expressed herself so delightfully and freshly: she had no ready-made phrases on the one hand and no striving for effect on the other.’

- Critic Edmund Wilson

‘I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity and her flaming self-respect, and it’s these things I would believe in even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn’t all that she should be.’

- F Scott Fitzgerald

‘I did not have a single feeling of inferiority, or shyness, or doubt, and no moral principles.’

‘All I want is to be very young always and very irresponsible, and to feel that my life is my own to live and be happy and die in my own way to please myself.’

‘Other people’s ideas of us are dependent largely on what they’ve hoped for.’

* * * * * * * *

Zelda Fitzgerald

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Zelda Fitzgerald
Zelda Sayre, February 1920
Born	Zelda Sayre July 24, 1900 Montgomery, Alabama, U.S.
Died	March 10, 1948 (aged 47) Asheville, North Carolina, U.S.
Occupation	Novelist short story writer playwright painter socialite
Period	1920–1948
Spouse	F. Scott Fitzgerald ​ ​ (m. 1920; died 1940)​
Children	Frances Scott Fitzgerald
Signature

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]

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 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 loss of memory.^[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

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 mother, Minerva Buckner "Minnie" Machen (November 23, 1860 – January 13, 1958), 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).^[29] Zelda was a spoiled child; her mother doted upon her daughter's every whim, but her father, Associate Justice Anthony Dickinson Sayre (1858–1931) of the Supreme Court of Alabama, was a strict and remote man.^[29] There is scholarly speculation regarding whether Anthony Sayre sexually abused Zelda as a child based on later writings,^[30][31] but there is no evidence confirming that Zelda was a victim of incest.^[32] Her parents were Episcopalians.^[33]

At the time of Zelda's birth, her family was a prominent and influential Southern clan who had been slave-holders before the American Civil War.^[34][35][36] According to biographer Nancy Milford, "if there was a Confederate establishment in the Deep South, Zelda Sayre came from the heart of it".^[37] Zelda's maternal grandfather was Willis Benson Machen, a former Confederate Senator and later an U.S. Senator from Kentucky.^[37] Her father's uncle was John Tyler Morgan,^[38] a Confederate general in the Civil War and the second Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama.^[39][40] 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.^[41] In addition to wielding considerable influence in national politics, Zelda's extended family owned the First White House of the Confederacy.^[42][35] According to biographer Sally Cline, "in Zelda's girlhood, ghosts of the late Confederacy drifted through the sleepy oak-lined streets,"^[43] and Zelda claimed that she drew her strength from Montgomery's Confederate past.^[43]

During her idle youth in Montgomery, Zelda's affluent Southern family employed half-a-dozen domestic servants, many of whom were African-American.^[42] Consequently, Zelda was unaccustomed to domestic labor or responsibilities of any kind.^[44][45] As the privileged child of wealthy parents,^[1] she danced, took ballet lessons, and enjoyed the outdoors.^[46] In her youth, the family spent summers in Saluda, North Carolina, a village that would appear in her artwork decades later.^[47] 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.^[48] A newspaper article about one of her dance performances quoted her as saying that she cared only about "boys and swimming".^[48]

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.^[48] Her father's reputation was something of a safety net, preventing her social ruin.^[46] 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 starlet Tallulah Bankhead—a mainstay of Montgomery gossip.^[49] 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."^[50] Upon her matriculation from high school, she was voted the "prettiest" and "most attractive" in her graduating class.^[1]

Courtship by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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 a country club in Montgomery.^[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.^[51] Heartbroken by this rejection, Scott had dropped out of Princeton University and volunteered for the United States Army amid World War I.^[52][53] While awaiting deployment to the Western front,^[53] he was stationed at Camp Sheridan, outside Montgomery.^[54]

While writing Ginevra King and begging her to resume their relationship,^[55] a lonely Fitzgerald began courting Zelda and other young Montgomery women.^[55] Scott called Zelda daily, and he visited Montgomery on his free days.^[56] He often spoke of his ambition to become a famous novelist, and he sent her a chapter of a book he was writing.^[56] At the time, Zelda dismissed Fitzgerald's remarks as mere boastfulness, and she concluded that he would never become a famous writer.^[57] Infatuated with Zelda, Scott redrafted the character of Rosalind Connage in his unpublished manuscript The Romantic Egotist to resemble her,^[58] and he told Zelda that "the heroine does resemble you in more ways than four."^[59]

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.^[60] 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."^[61] In the final pages of his novel, Fitzgerald altered Zelda's sentiments to refer to Union soldiers instead of Confederates.^[62]

During the early months of their courtship, Zelda and Scott strolled through the Confederate Cemetery at Oakwood.^[57][63] 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.^[64][63] 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.^[57]

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.^[65] Three days after Ginevra King married Bill Mitchell on September 4, 1918, Scott professed his affections for Zelda.^[66] In his ledger, Scott wrote that he had fallen in love on September 7, 1918.^[1] His love for Zelda grew 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."^[67] Ultimately, Zelda fell in love as well.^[56] 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."^[56]

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.^[68] Together again, Zelda and Scott now engaged in what he later described as sexual recklessness, and by December 1918, they had consummated their relationship.^[69] 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.^[70][71] Initially, Fitzgerald did not intend to marry Zelda,^[72] but the couple gradually viewed themselves as informally engaged, although Zelda declined to marry him until he proved financially successful.^[73][74]

On February 14, 1919, he was discharged from the military and went north to establish himself in New York City.^[75] During this time, Zelda mistakenly feared she was pregnant.^[76] 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."^[77][76] They wrote frequently, and by March 1920, Scott had sent Zelda his mother's ring, and the two had become engaged.^[78] 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.^[79][80] Having been rejected by both Zelda and Ginevra during the past year due to his lack of financial prospects, Scott suffered from intense despair,^[81] and he carried a revolver daily while contemplating suicide.^[82]

Soon after, in July 1919, Fitzgerald returned to St. Paul.^[83] 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.^[84] He decided to make one last attempt to become a novelist and to stake everything on the success or failure of a book.^[83] Abstaining from alcohol and parties,^[84] 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.^[85] 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."^[84]

Marriage and Celebrity

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 had completed his first novel, This Side of Paradise, and editor Maxwell Perkins of Charles Scribner's Sons accepted the manuscript for publication.^[86] Scott immediately wrote to Perkins and asked for an accelerated release to renew Zelda's faith in him: "I have so many things dependent on its success—including of course a girl."^[87] 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."^[57]

Zelda agreed to marry Scott once Scribner's published the novel;^[76] Fitzgerald, in turn, promised to bring her to New York with "all the iridescence of the beginning of the world."^[88] 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 wedding ceremony at St. Patrick's Cathedral.^[89] At the time of their wedding, Fitzgerald later claimed neither he nor Zelda still loved each other,^[90][91] and the early years of their marriage in New York City proved to be a disappointment.^[92][93][94] 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".^[57]

Despite the cooling of their affections, Scott and Zelda quickly became celebrities of New York, as much for their wild behavior as for the commercial success of This Side of Paradise. They were ordered to leave both the Biltmore Hotel and the Commodore Hotel for disturbing other guests.^[94] Their daily lives consisted of outrageous pranks and drunken escapades.^[95] While fully dressed, they jumped into the water fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel in New York.^[95] They frequently hired taxicabs and rode on the hood.^[95] 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.^[96] 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.^[97] 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,^[94] the Fitzgeralds moved to a cottage in Westport, Connecticut, where Scott worked on drafts of his second novel.^[98] Due to her privileged upbringing with many African-American servants, Zelda could not perform household responsibilities at Westport.^[99] During the early months of their marriage, Scott's unwashed clothes began disappearing.^[100] One day, he opened a closet and discovered his dirty clothes piled to the ceiling.^[100] Uncertain of what to do with unwashed clothes, Zelda had never sent them out for cleaning: she had simply tossed everything into the closet.^[100]

Soon after, Scott employed two maids and a laundress.^[101] Zelda's complete dependence upon servants became the comedic focus of magazine articles.^[102] 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."^[102]

While Scott attempted to write his next novel at their home in Westport, Zelda announced that she was homesick for the Deep South.^[103] In particular, she missed eating Southern cuisine such as peaches and biscuits for breakfast.^[103] She suggested that they travel to Montgomery, Alabama.^[103] On July 15, 1920, the couple traveled in a touring car—which Scott derogatorily nicknamed "the rolling junk"—to her parents' home in Montgomery.^[103] After visiting Zelda's family for several weeks, they abandoned the unreliable vehicle and returned via train to Westport, Connecticut.^[103] 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.^[103] Following this visit, the Fitzgeralds' relocated to an apartment at 38 West 59th Street in New York City.^[103]

Pregnancy and Scottie

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.^[104] She requested that the child be born on Southern soil in Alabama, but Fitzgerald adamantly refused.^[105] 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."^[105] To Zelda's chagrin, her husband insisted upon having the baby at his northern home in Saint Paul, Minnesota.^[106] 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."^[107] 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.^[108]

While writing The Beautiful and Damned, Scott drew upon "bits and pieces" of Zelda's diary and letters.^[b][110] He modeled the characters of Anthony Patch on himself and Gloria Patch on—in his words—the chill-mindedness and selfishness of Zelda.^[111] 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.^[110] 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.^[112]

Although Zelda had carefully proofread drafts of the novel,^[110] 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."^[113][114] 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".^[113]

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".^[115] In June 1922, Metropolitan Magazine published an essay by Zelda Fitzgerald titled "Eulogy on the Flapper".^[116] At the time flappers were typically young, modern women who bobbed their hair and wore short skirts.^[117][118] They also drank alcohol and had premarital sex.^[119][120] 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."^[121] 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.^[121]

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.^[122] 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.^[123] 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."^[124] 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.^[124]

Following the financial failure of Scott's play The Vegetable,^[125] the Fitzgeralds found themselves mired in debt. Although Scott wrote short stories furiously to pay the bills, he became burned out and depressed.^[126] 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.^[127] Following this incident, the couple departed in April 1924 for Paris, France, in the hope of living a more frugal existence abroad in Europe.^[128]

Expatriation to Europe

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.^[129] While Scott labored on drafts of The Great Gatsby, Zelda became infatuated with a French naval aviator, Edouard Jozan.^[130] The exact details of the supposed romance are unverifiable and contradictory,^[131][132] and Jozan himself claimed the Fitzgeralds invented the entire incident.^[133] 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.^[134] Scott purportedly challenged Jozan to duel and locked Zelda in their villa until he could kill him.^[135] Before any fatal confrontation could occur, Jozan—who had no intention of marrying Zelda—fled the Riviera, and the Fitzgeralds never saw him again.^[134] 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."^[133][136] 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.^[137] In fact, Jozan had been transferred by the French military to Indochina.^[138]

Regardless of whether any extramarital affair with Jozan occurred,^[139] the episode led to a breach of trust in their marriage,^[140] and Fitzgerald wrote in his notebook, "I knew something had happened that could never be repaired."^[131] 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.^[138] 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."^[138]

Scott finalized The Great Gatsby in October 1924.^[128] 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.^[141] After both Zelda and Perkins expressed their preference for The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald agreed.^[142] It was also on this trip, while ill with colitis, that Zelda began painting artworks.^[143]

Meeting Ernest Hemingway

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.^[131] 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".^[144] 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".^[145] 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.^[146] Hemingway alleged that Zelda sought to destroy her husband, and she purportedly taunted Fitzgerald over his penis' size.^[147] After examining it in a public restroom, Hemingway confirmed Fitzgerald's penis to be of average size.^[147]

Hemingway claimed that Zelda urged her husband to write lucrative short stories as opposed to novels in order to support her accustomed lifestyle.^[148][149] To supplement their income, Fitzgerald often wrote stories for magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's Weekly, and Esquire.^[150] "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."^[151] Scott would write his stories in an 'authentic' manner, then rewrite them to add plot twists which increased their salability as magazine stories.^[152] This "whoring" for Zelda—as Hemingway dubbed these sales—emerged as a sore point in their friendship.^[152] 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.^[153] 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.^[154]

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,^[155] and she alleged that Fitzgerald and Hemingway engaged in homosexual relations.^[156][157] In the ensuing months, she frequently belittled Scott with homophobic slurs during their public excursions.^[158] Biographer Matthew J. Bruccoli posits that Zelda's inordinate preoccupation with other persons' sexual behavior likely indicated the onset of her paranoid schizophrenia.^[159] However, Fitzgerald's sexuality was a popular subject of debate among his friends and acquaintances.^{[160][161][162]} As a youth, Fitzgerald had a close relationship with Father Sigourney Fay,^[163] a possibly gay Catholic priest,^[164][165] and Fitzgerald later used his last name for the idealized romantic character of Daisy Fay Buchanan.^[166] After college, Fitzgerald cross-dressed during outings in Minnesota and flirted with men at social events.^[167] While staying in Paris, rumors dogged Fitzgerald among the American expat community that he was gay.^[161]

Irritated by Zelda's recurrent homophobic attacks on his sexual identity,^[c] Scott decided to have sex with a Parisian prostitute.^[159] Zelda found condoms that he had purchased before any sexual encounter occurred, and a bitter quarrel ensued, resulting in ingravescent jealousy.^[169] 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.^[170] 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.^[171]

In January 1927, the Fitzgeralds relocated to Los Angeles where Scott wrote Lipstick for United Artists and met Hollywood starlet Lois Moran.^[172] Jealous of Moran, Zelda set fire to her clothing in a bathtub as a self-destructive act.^[173] She disparaged Moran as "a breakfast food that many men identified with whatever they missed from life."^[174] 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.^[175][172] 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.^[176]

Obsession and illness

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.^[177] Much of the conflict between them stemmed from the boredom and isolation Zelda experienced when Scott was writing.^[177] She would often interrupt him when he was working, and the two grew increasingly miserable.^[177] 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.^[110]

At the age of 28, she became obsessed with Russian ballet, and she decided to embark upon a career as a prima ballerina.^[96] 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."^[178] 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.^[110][179] After the Fitzgeralds returned to Europe in Summer 1928, Scott paid for Zelda to study under Russian ballerina Lubov Egorova in Paris.^[180]

In September 1929, the San Carlo Opera Ballet Company in Naples invited her to join their ballet school.^[180] In preparation, Zelda undertook a grueling daily practice of up to eight hours a day,^[181] and she "punished her body in strenuous efforts to improve."^[110] According to Zelda's daughter, although Scott "greatly appreciated and encouraged his wife's unusual talents and ebullient imagination,"^[115] he became alarmed when her "dancing became a twenty-four-hour preoccupation which was destroying her physical and mental health."^[115] Soon after, Zelda collapsed from physical and mental exhaustion.^[181] One evening, Scott returned home to find an exhausted Zelda seated on the floor and entranced with a pile of sand.^[96] When he asked her what she was doing, she could not speak.^[96] Summoning a French doctor, the doctor examined Zelda and informed her husband that "your wife is mad."^[96]

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.^[182] 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 9-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.^[183] On May 22, 1930, she moved to Valmont sanatorium in Montreux, Switzerland.^[184] 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.^[184] At Prangins in June, Dr. Oscar Forel issued a tentative diagnosis of schizophrenia,^[8] but he feared her psychological condition might be far worse.^[185] 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.^[185]

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.^[186]) She was released from Prangins in September 1931.^[184] In an attempt to keep his wife out of an asylum, Scott hired nurses and attendants to care for Zelda at all times.^[96] Although there were periods where her behavior was merely eccentric, she could frequently become a danger to herself and others.^[96] 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.^[187] 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.^[184]

Save Me the Waltz

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.^[188] Over her husband's objections,^[189] the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore admitted Zelda on February 12, 1932.^[188] Dr. Adolf Meyer, an expert on schizophrenia, oversaw her treatment.^[189] As part of her recovery routine, she spent at least two hours a day writing a manuscript.^[190] At the Phipps Clinic, Zelda developed a bond with Dr. Mildred Squires, a female resident.^[189] 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.^[184]

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.^[191] 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."^[192] Zelda finished the novel on March 9. She sent the unaltered manuscript to Scott's editor, Maxwell Perkins, at Scribner's.^[193]

Surprised to receive an unannounced novel in the mail from Zelda, Perkins carefully perused the manuscript.^[193] He concluded the work had "a slightly deranged quality which gave him the impression that the author had difficulty in separating fiction from reality."^[193] 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.^[193] Perkins hoped that her husband might be able to improve its overall quality with his criticism.^[193]

Upon learning that Zelda had submitted her manuscript to Perkins, Scott became angry that she had not shown her manuscript to him beforehand.^[194] After reading the manuscript, he objected to her novel's plagiarism of his protagonist in This Side of Paradise.^[193] He was further upset to learn that Zelda's novel used the very same plot elements as his upcoming novel, Tender Is the Night.^[195] After receiving letters from Scott delineating these objections, Zelda wrote to Scott apologetically that she was "afraid we might have touched the same material."^[196]

Meeting 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.^[197] Consequently, his requested revisions were "relatively few," and "the disagreement was quickly resolved, with Scott recommending the novel to Perkins."^[195][198] Several weeks later, Scott wrote enthusiastically 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."^[199] Although unimpressed,^[200] Perkins agreed to publish the work as a way for Fitzgerald to repay his financial debt to Scribner's.^[201] 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.^[201]

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.^[202] Although discharged, she remained mentally unwell.^[203] One month later, Fitzgerald took her to lunch with critic H. L. Mencken, the literary editor of The American Mercury.^[203] 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."^[203] Throughout the luncheon, she manifested signs of mental distress.^[203] 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."^[204] He regretted that F. Scott Fitzgerald could not write novels, as he had to write magazine stories to pay for Zelda's psychiatric treatment.^[203]

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.^[205] According to Zelda, the book derived its title from a Victor record catalog,^[206] 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.^[207]

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)^[208]

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.^[209] 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."^[210]

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".^[211] 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."^[211] The overwhelmingly negative reviews bewildered and distressed Zelda.^[211]

Painting and later years

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 Balitmore, New York, and in Asheville, North Carolina.^[184] When Scott visited Zelda in the sanatoriums, she increasingly exhibited signs of mental instability.^[212] During one visit, Scott and friends took Zelda on an outing to a nearby home in Tryon, North Carolina.^[212] During the lunch, she became withdrawn and ceased communication.^[212] 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.^[212] 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.^[212]

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][184] 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.^[115] 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."^[213] Following this remark, Zelda attempted to paint watercolors while in and out of sanatoriums.^[214]

In March 1934, Scott Fitzgerald arranged the first exhibition of Zelda's artwork—13 paintings and 15 drawings—in New York City.^[14][215] As with the tepid reception of her book, New York critics were ill-disposed towards her paintings.^[214] 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.^[216]

Following the critical failure of her artwork exhibition, Scott awoke one morning to discover Zelda had gone missing.^[212] After the arrival of a doctor and several attendants, a manhunt ensued in New York City.^[212] Ultimately, they found Zelda in Central Park digging a grave.^[212] 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:^[217]

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.^[217]

Zelda remained in the hospital while Scott returned to Hollywood for a $1,000-a-week job with MGM in June 1937.^[218] 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.^[219][220] When a disappointed King returned to Chicago, Fitzgerald settled into a clandestine relationship with Hollywood gossip columnist Sheilah Graham.^[218] Throughout their relationship, Graham claimed Fitzgerald felt constant guilt over Zelda's mental illness and confinement.^[221] He repeatedly attempted sobriety, had depression, had violent outbursts, and attempted suicide.^[222]

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.^[223] He returned to the United States so exhausted and intoxicated that he required hospitalization.^[224] The Fitzgeralds never saw each other again.^[225]

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.^[226] She was nearly forty now, her friends were long gone, and the Fitzgeralds no longer had much money. They wrote to each other frequently until 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.^[227]

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."^[227] 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

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.^[151] 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.^[228] According to biographer Nancy Milford, Zelda became "taken with the idea of fascism as a way of holding everything together, of ordering the masses."^[228] 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."^[228]

In November 1947, Zelda returned for the last time to Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina.^[226] At this point, she was physically gaunt and weighed only 130 pounds.^[229] 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.^[230][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.^[231] 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.^[215] 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.^[215] 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."^[232]

Critical reappraisal

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.^[233] 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,^[234] and the book proved popular among beleaguered troops.^[235] By 1944, a full-scale Fitzgerald revival had occurred.^[236] 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.^[237]

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.^[238]

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."^[239] 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."^[239] 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.^[240] 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.'"^[241]

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.^[242] 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.^[243] In particular, partisan scholars of Zelda frequently depict Scott Fitzgerald as a domineering husband who drove his wife insane.^[244]

In response to this narrative, Zelda's daughter Scottie Fitzgerald wrote an essay dispelling such "inaccurate" interpretations.^[245] 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".^[246] 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."^[246] 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."^[244]

Legacy and influence

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.^[247]

Zelda's name served as inspiration for Princess Zelda, the eponymous character of The Legend of Zelda series of video games.^[248] 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.^[249][250] 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.^[251]

In 1992, Zelda and her daughter Scottie were posthumously inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame.^[252]

References

Notes

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".^[109]
3. ^ Fessenden (2005) argues that Fitzgerald struggled with his sexual orientation.^[168] 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".^[159]

Citations

1. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e f g h} Tate 1998, p. 85.
2. ^ Fitzgerald 2004, p. 46.
3. ^ Jump up to:^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. ^ Jump up to:^a b Curnutt 2004, pp. 31, 62; Bruccoli 2002, p. 131.
5. ^ Jump up to:^a b Milford 1970, p. 156.
6. ^ Milford 1970, p. 156; Stamberg 2013.
7. ^ Jump up to:^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. ^ Jump up to:^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. ^ Jump up to:^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. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Bruccoli 2002, pp. 327–328.
12. ^ Jump up to:^a b c d Bruccoli 2002, pp. 343, 362.
13. ^ Jump up to:^a b Bruccoli 2002, p. 343.
14. ^ Jump up to:^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. ^ Jump up to:^a b c d Milford 1970, pp. 382–383.
17. ^ Jump up to:^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. ^ Jump up to:^a b Cline 2002, p. 286: "Zelda was administered insulin shock treatments which were continued for ten years."
19. ^ Jump up to:^a b Cline 2002, p. 351.
20. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e f} Smith 2022.
21. ^ Young 1979; Smith 2022.
22. ^ Jump up to:^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. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Sandomir 2022.
24. ^ Jump up to:^a b Davis 1995, p. 327; Tavernier-Courbin 1979, p. 23.
25. ^ Jump up to:^a b Tavernier-Courbin 1979, p. 22.
26. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Davis 1995, p. 327.
27. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Adair 2005.
28. ^ Alabama Women's Hall of Fame 1992.
29. ^ Jump up to:^a b Tate 1998, p. 85; Cline 2002, p. 13.
30. ^ Bate 2021, p. 251.
31. ^ 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..."
32. ^ Tate 1998, p. 59.
33. ^ Milford 1970, p. 43; Bruccoli 2002, p. 91.
34. ^ Tate 1998, p. 85; Milford 1970, p. 3.
35. ^ Jump up to:^a b Bruccoli, Smith & Kerr 2003, p. 38.
36. ^ National Archives 2016.
37. ^ Jump up to:^a b Milford 1970, pp. 3–4.
38. ^ Milford 1970, p. 5.
39. ^ Davis 1924, pp. 45, 56, 59; Bowers 1929, p. 310; The Montgomery Advertiser 1960, p. 4.
40. ^ Svrluga 2016; Hauser 2022; Holthouse 2008.
41. ^ Upchurch 2004.
42. ^ Jump up to:^a b Wagner-Martin 2004, p. 24.
43. ^ Jump up to:^a b Cline 2002, p. 13.
44. ^ Wagner-Martin 2004, p. 24; Bruccoli 2002, pp. 189, 437.
45. ^ Turnbull 1962, p. 111: "Zelda was no housekeeper. Sketchy about ordering meals, she completely ignored the laundry".
46. ^ Jump up to:^a b Milford 1970, pp. 9–13.
47. ^ Wagner-Martin 2004, p. 211.
48. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Milford 1970, pp. 16–17.
49. ^ Cline 2002, pp. 23–25, 37.
50. ^ Milford 1970, p. 22.
51. ^ Milford 1970, p. 32; Mizener 1951, p. 70.
52. ^ Mizener 1951, p. 70.
53. ^ Jump up to:^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.
54. ^ Tate 1998, pp. 6, 32; Bruccoli 2002, pp. 79, 82.
55. ^ Jump up to:^a b West 2005, pp. 65–66.
56. ^ Jump up to:^a b c d Milford 1970, pp. 33–34.
57. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e} Turnbull 1962, p. 102.
58. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 122.
59. ^ Milford 1970, p. 32.
60. ^ Cline 2002, p. 65; Bruccoli 2002, p. 95.
61. ^ Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald 2002, p. 96.
62. ^ Fitzgerald 1920, p. 304.
63. ^ Jump up to:^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."
64. ^ 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".
65. ^ West 2005, pp. 67–68; Bruccoli 2002, p. 86.
66. ^ West 2005, p. 73.
67. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 111.
68. ^ West 2005, p. 73; Bruccoli 2002, p. 89.
69. ^ Milford 1970, pp. 35–36; Bruccoli 2002, p. 89.
70. ^ 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".
71. ^ 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."
72. ^ 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".
73. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 91.
74. ^ 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."
75. ^ Milford 1970, pp. 35–36.
76. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Bruccoli 2002, p. 109.
77. ^ Cline 2002, p. 73.
78. ^ Milford 1970, p. 42; Turnbull 1962, p. 92.
79. ^ 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."
80. ^ 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."
81. ^ Bruccoli 2002, pp. 95–96; Fitzgerald 1966, p. 108.
82. ^ Turnbull 1962, pp. 93–94.
83. ^ Jump up to:^a b Bruccoli 2002, p. 96.
84. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Bruccoli 2002, p. 97.
85. ^ Milford 1970, p. 55; West 2005, pp. 65, 74, 95.
86. ^ Fitzgerald 1945, p. 86.
87. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 99.
88. ^ Milford 1970, p. 57.
89. ^ Turnbull 1962, p. 105; Bruccoli 2002, p. 128.
90. ^ 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."
91. ^ 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".
92. ^ 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".
93. ^ 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."
94. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Turnbull 1962, p. 110.
95. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Graham & Frank 1958, p. 180.
96. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e f g} Graham & Frank 1958, p. 242.
97. ^ Bruccoli 2002, pp. 131–32.
98. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. xxv.
99. ^ Wagner-Martin 2004, p. 24; Bruccoli 2002, pp. 139, 189, 437; Turnbull 1962, p. 111.
100. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Graham & Frank 1958, p. 241.
101. ^ Milford 1970, p. 95.
102. ^ Jump up to:^a b Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald 2002, p. xxvii, Introduction.
103. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e f g} Bruccoli 2002, p. 143.
104. ^ Cline 2002, p. 108.
105. ^ Jump up to:^a b Cline 2002, p. 111.
106. ^ Curnutt 2004, p. 32.
107. ^ Tate 1998, p. 85; Mizener 1951, p. 63.
108. ^ Milford 1970, p. 84; Mizener 1951, p. 63.
109. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 166.
110. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e f} Tate 1998, p. 86.
111. ^ Fitzgerald 1966, pp. 355–356.
112. ^ Milford 1970, p. 89.
113. ^ Jump up to:^a b Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald 2002, pp. xxvii–viii.
114. ^ Tate 1998, p. 14: "The review was partly a joke".
115. ^ Jump up to:^a b c d Fitzgerald 1991, p. vi.
116. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 162.
117. ^ 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".
118. ^ Conor 2004, pp. 210, 221.
119. ^ 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".
120. ^ 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".
121. ^ Jump up to:^a b Milford 1970, pp. 91–92.
122. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 158; Curnutt 2004, p. 31.
123. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 158.
124. ^ Jump up to:^a b Milford 1970, p. 88.
125. ^ Turnbull 1962, p. 140; Mizener 1951, pp. 155–156.
126. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 185.
127. ^ Fitzgerald 1945, p. 21; Pollak 2015, p. MB2.
128. ^ Jump up to:^a b Bruccoli 2002, p. xxvi.
129. ^ Fitzgerald 1945, p. 272.
130. ^ Tate 1998, p. 86; Bruccoli 2002, p. 195; Milford 1970, pp. 108–112.
131. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Bruccoli 2002, p. 195.
132. ^ Tate 1998, p. 86: "It is impossible to determine whether the affair was consummated".
133. ^ Jump up to:^a b Milford 1970, pp. 108–112.
134. ^ Jump up to:^a b Milford 1970, pp. 108–112; Bruccoli 2002, pp. 195–196; Tate 1998, p. 86.
135. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 195: "...Fitzgerald told Sheilah Graham... that he had fought a duel with Jozan".
136. ^ 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."
137. ^ Bruccoli 2002, pp. 195–196.
138. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Bruccoli 2002, p. 196.
139. ^ Milford 1970, pp. 108–112, 114.
140. ^ Mizener 1951, p. 164; Milford 1970, p. 112.
141. ^ Fitzgerald & Perkins 1971, p. 87.
142. ^ Bruccoli 2002, pp. 206–207.
143. ^ Milford 1970, p. 113.
144. ^ Milford 1970, p. 122.
145. ^ Milford 1970; Bruccoli 2002, p. 226.
146. ^ Hemingway 1964, p. 186.
147. ^ Jump up to:^a b Hemingway 1964, p. 190.
148. ^ Hemingway 1964, pp. 180–181.
149. ^ Bruccoli 2002, pp. 437, 468–469: "She wanted me to work too much for her and not enough for my dream."
150. ^ Turnbull 1962, pp. 116, 280; Mizener 1951, p. 270.
151. ^ Jump up to:^a b Milford 1970, p. 380.
152. ^ Jump up to:^a b Hemingway 1964, p. 155.
153. ^ Hemingway 1964, p. 176.
154. ^ Usher 2014, p. 230.
155. ^ Fessenden 2005, p. 33.
156. ^ Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald 2002, p. 65.
157. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 275: "Zelda extended her attack on Fitzgerald's masculinity by charging that he was involved in a homosexual liaison with Hemingway".
158. ^ Milford 1970, p. 183.
159. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Bruccoli 2002, p. 275.
160. ^ Fessenden 2005, p. 28: "Fitzgerald's career records the ambient, dogging pressure to repel charges of his own homosexuality".
161. ^ Jump up to:^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.
162. ^ Milford 1970, p. 154; Kerr 1996, p. 417.
163. ^ 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".
164. ^ Fessenden 2005, p. 28.
165. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 275: "If Fay was a homosexual, as has been asserted without proof, Fitzgerald was presumably unaware of it".
166. ^ Fessenden 2005, p. 30.
167. ^ 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".
168. ^ Fessenden 2005, pp. 32–33.
169. ^ Bruccoli 2002, pp. 275, 277.
170. ^ Milford 1970, p. 117; Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald 2002, p. 57.
171. ^ Turnbull 1962, p. 352.
172. ^ Jump up to:^a b Bruccoli 2002, p. xxvii.
173. ^ Buller 2005, p. 9.
174. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 256.
175. ^ Turnbull 1962, p. 352; Buller 2005, pp. 6–8.
176. ^ Wilson 2007, p. 311.
177. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Milford 1970, pp. 135–138.
178. ^ Milford 1970, p. 141.
179. ^ 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."
180. ^ Jump up to:^a b Tate 1998, pp. 86–87, 283.
181. ^ Jump up to:^a b Milford 1970, pp. 141, 157.
182. ^ Bruccoli 2002, pp. 288–289; Milford 1970, p. 156.
183. ^ Tate 1998, pp. 87–88, 283; Ludwig 1995, p. 181.
184. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e f g} Tate 1998, pp. 87–88, 283.
185. ^ Jump up to:^a b Milford 1970, p. 179.
186. ^ Stamberg 2013; Kramer 1996, p. 106.
187. ^ Graham & Frank 1958, pp. 242–243.
188. ^ Jump up to:^a b Bruccoli 2002, p. 320; Tate 1998, pp. 87–88, 283.
189. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Bruccoli 2002, p. 320.
190. ^ Milford 1970, pp. 209–212.
191. ^ Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald 2002, p. 145; Milford 1970, p. 213.
192. ^ Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald 2002, p. 156.
193. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e f} Berg 1978, pp. 235–236.
194. ^ Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald 2002, p. 163; Berg 1978, p. 236.
195. ^ Jump up to:^a b Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald 2002, p. 164.
196. ^ Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald 2002, p. 163.
197. ^ Berg 1978, pp. 237, 251.
198. ^ Fitzgerald 1991, p. 9.
199. ^ Fitzgerald 1966, p. 262.
200. ^ Berg 1978, p. 250: "She has some mighty bad tricks of writing, but she is now getting over the worst of them."
201. ^ Jump up to:^a b Berg 1978, p. 251.
202. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. xxviii.
203. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e} Mencken 1989, pp. 44–45.
204. ^ Mencken 1989, p. 56.
205. ^ Cline 2002, p. 320; Milford 1970, p. 264.
206. ^ Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald 2002, p. 207.
207. ^ Tavernier-Courbin 1979, pp. 31–33.
208. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 328.
209. ^ Tavernier-Courbin 1979, p. 36.
210. ^ Tavernier-Courbin 1979, p. 40.
211. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Milford 1970, pp. 262–263.
212. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e f g h} Graham & Frank 1958, pp. 243–244.
213. ^ Bruccoli 2002, p. 345.
214. ^ Jump up to:^a b Bruccoli 2002, p. 362.
215. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Tate 1998, p. 88.
216. ^ Milford 1970, p. 290.
217. ^ Jump up to:^a b Milford 1970, p. 308.
218. ^ Jump up to:^a b Milford 1970, pp. 311–313.
219. ^ Corrigan 2014, p. 59; Smith 2003, p. E1; Noden 2003.
220. ^ 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."
221. ^ 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.'"
222. ^ Graham & Frank 1958, pp. 255–257, 275, 281, 296, 309.
223. ^ Turnbull 1962, pp. 298–299; Mizener 1951, p. 283.
224. ^ Milford 1970, p. 327.
225. ^ Milford 1970, p. 329; Curnutt 2004, p. 43.
226. ^ Jump up to:^a b Tate 1998, p. 284.
227. ^ Jump up to:^a b Milford 1970, pp. 350–353.
228. ^ Jump up to:^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.'"
229. ^ Cline 2002, p. 401.
230. ^ Cline 2002, p. 400.
231. ^ Young 1979.
232. ^ Mangum 2016, pp. 27–39.
233. ^ Mizener 1951, p. 300.
234. ^ 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".
235. ^ Wittels 1945.
236. ^ Mizener 1960.
237. ^ Prigozy 2002, pp. 15–18.
238. ^ Prigozy 2002, pp. 18–21.
239. ^ Jump up to:^a b Tavernier-Courbin 1979, p. 23.
240. ^ Fitzgerald 1991.
241. ^ Kakutani 1991, p. 15.
242. ^ Prigozy 2002, pp. 227–233.
243. ^ Cline 2002, p. 6.
244. ^ Jump up to:^a b Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald 2002, p. xxix.
245. ^ Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald 2002, pp. xxix, v.
246. ^ Jump up to:^a b Fitzgerald 1991, p. v.
247. ^ Tate 2007, p. 6.
248. ^ Ryan 2017.
249. ^ 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."
250. ^ Carlson 2012; Carlson 2014.
251. ^ Newton 2005.
252. ^ Alabama Women's Hall of Fame Inductees 2005.

Works cited

Primary sources

• 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
• 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 Eclectic Collection of Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience, San Francisco, California: Chronicle Books, ISBN 978-1-4521-3425-3 – via Internet Archive
• Wilson, Edmund (2007) [1952], Dabney, Lewis M. (ed.), Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s & 30s: The Shores of Light / Axel's Castle / Uncollected Reviews, New York: Library of America, ISBN 978-1-59853-013-1 – via Google Books
• Wittels, David G. (June 23, 1945), "What the G.I. Reads", The Saturday Evening Post, Indianapolis, Indiana: Curtis Publishing, vol. 217, no. 52, pp. 11, 91–92, OCLC 26501505

Print sources

• Adair, Everl (Spring 2005), "The Art of Zelda Fitzgerald", Alabama Heritage, Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama, no. 76, archived from the original on October 27, 2022, retrieved January 14, 2023
• Upchurch, Thomas Adams (April 2004), "Senator John Tyler Morgan and the Genesis of Jim Crow Ideology, 1889-1891", Alabama Review, Montgomery, Alabama: Alabama Historical Association, 57 (2): 110–131, archived from the original on June 17, 2006, retrieved January 14, 2023
• Bate, Jonathan (September 2021), Bright Star, Green Light: The Beautiful Works and Damned Lives of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, ISBN 978-0-300-25657-4 – via Google Books
• Berg, A. Scott (1978), Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, New York: Simon & Schuster, ISBN 0-671-82719-7 – via Internet Archive
• Bowers, Claude G. (1929), The Tragic Era: The Revolution After Lincoln, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Riverside Press – via Internet Archive, On his death the mantle passed to General John T. Morgan, who later became one of the most distinguished of Senators and statesmen.
• Bruccoli, Matthew J. (2002) [1981], Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald (2nd rev. ed.), Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, ISBN 1-57003-455-9 – via Internet Archive
• —————————; Smith, Scottie Fitzgerald; Kerr, Joan P., eds. (2003), The Romantic Egoists: A Pictorial Autobiography from the Scrapbooks and Albums of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, ISBN 9781570035296 – via Google Books
• Buller, Richard (2005), "F. Scott Fitzgerald, Lois Moran, and the Mystery of Mariposa Street", The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 4: 3–19, doi:10.1111/j.1755-6333.2005.tb00013.x, JSTOR 41583088, retrieved December 18, 2022
• Cline, Sally (2002), Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise, New York: Arcade Publishing, ISBN 1-55970-688-0 – via Internet Archive
• Cole, John Y., ed. (1984), Books in Action: The Armed Services Editions, Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, ISBN 978-0-8444-0466-0 – via Internet Archive
• Curnutt, Kirk, ed. (2004), A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-515302-2 – via Google Books
• Conor, Liz (June 22, 2004), The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, ISBN 978-0-253-21670-0 – via Google Books
• Corrigan, Maureen (September 9, 2014), So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures, New York City: Little, Brown and Company, ISBN 978-0-316-23008-7 – via Internet Archive
• Daniel, Anne Margaret (August 25, 2021), "The Odd Couple: John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald", The Spectator, London, United Kingdom, retrieved December 27, 2021
• Davis, Simone Weil (1995), "'The Burden of Reflecting': Effort and Desire in Zelda Fitzgerald's Save Me the Waltz", Modern Language Quarterly, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 56 (3): 327–362, doi:10.1215/00267929-56-3-327, retrieved January 14, 2023
• Davis, Susan Lawrence (1924), Authentic History Ku Klux Klan, 1865–1877, New York, pp. 45, 56, 59 – via Internet Archive, General James H. Clanton of Montgomery was the first Grand Dragon of the Realm of Alabama Ku Klux Klan, and continued in this capacity until his death, when General John T. Morgan was elected in his place, and served until 1876. The Ku Klux Klan in 1877 was led by General Edmund W. Pettus as Grand Dragon of the Realm.
• Fessenden, Tracy (2005), "F. Scott Fitzgerald's Catholic Closet", U.S. Catholic Historian, Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 23 (3): 19–40, JSTOR 25154963, retrieved December 12, 2021
• Hauser, Christine (February 8, 2022), "An Alabama Building Honors a Klan Leader. Officials Are Adding a Black Student's Name", The New York Times, New York City, retrieved December 17, 2022, Morgan Hall, named for John Tyler Morgan, a former Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon...
• Kakutani, Michiko (August 20, 1991), "Books of The Times; That Other Fitzgerald Could Turn a Word, Too", The New York Times, New York City, retrieved January 7, 2023
• Kerr, Frances (1996), "Feeling 'Half Feminine': Modernism and the Politics of Emotion in The Great Gatsby", American Literature, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 68 (2): 405–31, doi:10.2307/2928304, JSTOR 2928304, retrieved January 15, 2022
• Kramer, Peter D. (December 1, 1996), "How Crazy Was Zelda?", The New York Times, New York City, retrieved October 1, 2021
• Ludwig, Arnold M. (1995), The Price of Greatness: Resolving the Creativity and Madness Controversy, New York: Guilford Press, ISBN 978-0-89862-839-5 – via Google Books
• Milford, Nancy (1970), Zelda: A Biography, New York: Harper & Row, LCCN 66-20742 – via Internet Archive
• Mizener, Arthur (April 24, 1960), "Gatsby, 35 Years Later", The New York Times, New York, retrieved January 15, 2023
• Mizener, Arthur (1951), The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin – via Internet Archive
• Prigozy, Ruth, ed. (2002), The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-62447-9 – via Google Books
• Noden, Merrell (November 5, 2003), "Fitzgerald's First Love", Princeton Alumni Weekly, Princeton, New Jersey, archived from the original on January 4, 2020, retrieved December 18, 2022
• Pollak, Michael (August 7, 2015), "The Bobbed-Hair Bandit of Brooklyn", The New York Times, New York City, p. MB2, ISSN 0362-4331, retrieved January 7, 2023
• "Rogers' Voice and Thad Stevens", The Montgomery Advertiser, Montgomery, Alabama, p. 4, February 4, 1960, retrieved December 17, 2022 – via Newspapers.com, The first leader of the Klan in this state was Gen. James H. Clanton, for whom one of our fine towns is named. And on his death, the leadership passed to Alabama's Gen. John Tyler Morgan.'
• Ryan, Patrick (January 26, 2017), "What's behind our fascination with Zelda Fitzgerald?", USA Today, McLean, Virginia, retrieved December 18, 2022
• Sandomir, Richard (March 31, 2022), "Nancy Milford, Biographer of Zelda Fitzgerald, Dies at 84", The New York Times, New York City, retrieved December 18, 2022
• Smith, Anne Chesky (December 5, 2022), "Inside the 1948 fire that killed Zelda Fitzgerald", Asheville Citizen-Times, Asheville, North Carolina, retrieved December 17, 2022, The police questioned Willie Mae, a single, 'middle-aged, stocky (woman with) straight hair and a plain face,' for the next six hours. When asked whether she set fire to the hospital's Central Building, Willie Mae replied, 'I don't know. I really don't know. I don't believe I did, but I could have.'
• Smith, Dinitia (September 8, 2003), "Love Notes Drenched In Moonlight: Hints of Future Novels In Letters to Fitzgerald", The New York Times, New York City, retrieved December 18, 2022
• Svrluga, Susan (February 22, 2016), "Calls to change U. of Alabama building name to honor Harper Lee instead of KKK leader", The Washington Post, Washington, D.C., retrieved December 18, 2022
• Tate, Mary Jo (2007), Critical Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work, Infobase Publishing, ISBN 978-1-4381-0845-2 – via Google Books
• —————— (1998) [1997], F. Scott Fitzgerald A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work, New York: Facts On File, ISBN 0-8160-3150-9 – via Internet Archive
• Tavernier-Courbin, Jacqueline (1979), "Art as Woman's Response and Search: Zelda Fitzgerald's Save Me the Waltz", Southern Literary Journal, Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 11 (2): 22–42, JSTOR 20077612
• Turnbull, Andrew (1962) [1954], Scott Fitzgerald, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, LCCN 62-9315 – via Internet Archive
• Wagner-Martin, Linda (Summer 2004), "Zelda Sayre, Belle", Southern Cultures, Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 10 (2): 19–49, doi:10.1353/scu.2004.0029, JSTOR 26390953, S2CID 143270051, retrieved June 6, 2022
• West, James L. W. (2005), The Perfect Hour: The Romance of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ginevra King, His First Love, New 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, 2022

Online sources

• "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 Poverty Law Center, archived 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, archived 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, archived 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., 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, 2023

External links

•  Media related to Zelda Fitzgerald at Wikimedia Commons
• Works by or about Zelda Fitzgerald at Internet Archive
• "Zelda Fitzgerald", Encyclopedia of Alabama