Zelda Fitzgerald

Zelda Fitzgerald, born Zelda Sayre on July 24, 1900, in Montgomery, Alabama, was an American novelist, painter, writer, and socialite whose life became closely tied to the public image of the Jazz Age. She grew up the youngest of six children in a wealthy Southern family and became locally famous for her beauty, high spirits, and willingness to shock the expectations placed on young women in her community. She danced, took ballet lessons, drank gin, smoked cigarettes, flirted openly, and drew attention for acts meant to flout convention.

In 1920, Zelda married F. Scott Fitzgerald after the popular success of his debut novel, This Side of Paradise. The book brought the young couple into the public eye, and Zelda was soon described in the national press as the first American flapper. Newspapers treated their wild antics and constant partying as symbols of the Jazz Age, calling the couple the enfants terribles of the era. Yet behind that public image, their marriage was strained by alleged infidelity and bitter recriminations.

Zelda’s thinking and art were shaped by a complicated background. Her family belonged to a prominent Southern clan with deep ties to the Confederacy and to the politics of the Jim Crow era. Her father, Anthony Dickinson Sayre, was an Alabama politician and a strict, remote figure whom Zelda called a “living fortress.” Her mother, Minerva Buckner Machen, doted on her. As a child of privilege, Zelda was unaccustomed to domestic labor, and her youth in Montgomery mixed ease, attention, rebellion, and the weight of Southern history.

After Zelda traveled abroad to Europe, her mental health deteriorated, and she required psychiatric care. Doctors diagnosed her with schizophrenia, though later posthumous diagnoses have suggested bipolar disorder. While institutionalized at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, she wrote her 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. Published by Scribner’s, the novel received mostly negative reviews and sold poorly. Disappointed, Zelda turned to playwriting and painting. She completed the stage play Scandalabra in 1932, but Broadway producers declined to produce it. A 1934 exhibition of her watercolors also met with a disappointing critical response.

Scott Fitzgerald died in December 1940 while the two were living apart. After his death, Zelda tried to write a second novel, Caesar’s Things, but recurrent voluntary institutionalization interrupted the work, and she did not finish it. By then, she had undergone more than ten years of electroshock therapy and insulin shock treatments and suffered from severe memory loss. She died on March 10, 1948, in a fire at Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. Later interest in her work grew after Nancy Milford’s 1970 biography, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Scholars reexamined Save Me the Waltz, and her paintings were exhibited after her death in the United States and Europe. In 1992, she was inducted into the Alabama Women’s Hall of Fame. Her words remain compelling because they come from a woman who was both a public symbol of her age and an artist trying to tell her own version of it.