Zelda Fitzgerald
Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald (July 24, 1900 – March 10, 1948), born Zelda Sayre in Montgomery, Alabama, was an American novelist and the wife of writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. She was an icon of the 1920s—dubbed by her husband "the first American Flapper." After the success of his first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), the Fitzgeralds became celebrities. From early adolescence Zelda was a formidable presence in Southern society, outshining all other belles as the star in ballet recitals and elite country club events. Shortly after finishing high school, she met F. Scott Fitzgerald at a country club dance, but was unimpressed and agreed with her family on his limited financial prospects to provide for a family. With his professed infatuation, a light flirtation evolved into a lengthy long distance courtship of weekly letters, with Fitzgerald aware of her uncommitted dating of other men. Determined to obtain financial security, and thus Zelda, Fitzgerald increased his writing from articles to his first book. On March 20, 1920, Scribner's Sons agreed to publish his novel This Side of Paradise and Fitzgerald immediately cabled Zelda, who agreed to travel to New York to marry and live with him. The couple wed in New York on April 3, 1920, and later moved to Europe. While Scott received acclaim for The Great Gatsby and his short stories, and the couple socialized with literary luminaries like Ernest Hemingway, their marriage was a tangle of jealousy, resentment and acrimony. Scott used their relationship as material in his novels, even lifting snippets from Zelda's diary and assigning them to his fictional heroines. Seeking an artistic identity of her own, Zelda wrote magazine articles and short stories, and at 27 became obsessed with a career as a ballerina, practicing to exhaustion. The strain of her tempestuous marriage, Scott's increasing alcoholism, and her growing instability presaged Zelda's admittance in 1930 to the Sheppard Pratt sanatorium in Towson, Maryland, where she was diagnosed with schizophrenia (though, according to scholars, she was more likely to have had bipolar disorder). While there, she wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, Save Me the Waltz, which was published in 1932. Scott was furious that she had used material from their life together, though he would go on to do the same, as in Tender Is the Night, published in 1934; the two novels provide contrasting portrayals of the couple's failing marriage. Back in America, Scott went to Hollywood where he tried screenwriting and began a relationship with the movie columnist Sheilah Graham. In 1936, Zelda entered the Highland Mental Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. Scott died in Hollywood in 1940, having last seen Zelda a year and a half earlier. She spent her remaining years working on a second novel, which she never completed, and she painted extensively. In 1948 she died when the hospital in which she was residing caught fire. Interest in the Fitzgeralds resurged shortly after her death: the couple has been the subject of popular books, movies and scholarly attention. After a life as an emblem of the Jazz Age, Roaring Twenties, and Lost Generation, Zelda Fitzgerald posthumously found a new role: after a popular 1970 biography portrayed her as a victim of an overbearing husband, she became a feminist icon. She was inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame in 1992.