Zelda Fitzgerald(1900-1948)
- Writer
Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was born in Montgomery, Alabama. She was strikingly beautiful and intelligent, but wild and impatient with
learning. In the summer of 1918, shortly after graduating from high school, she met an Army lieutenant and aspiring novelist named F. Scott Fitzgerald at a dance at the Montgomery Country Club. Following a stormy courtship, Zelda married him one week after the publication of his first novel. Their only child Frances Scott Fitzgerald Smith (nicknamed "Scottie") was born in October 1921. The early years of their marriage were ones of high living, financed by Scott's success as a writer and shaped by his drinking. Between 1922 and 1932, Zelda wrote articles for the New York Tribune, Scribner's magazine, Metropolitan magazine and The New Yorker.
At the age of 27, Zelda decided to pursue her lifelong dream of becoming a professional ballerina, and began to study ballet in Paris. However, after two years of dedication, she realized she had started the pursuit of dance too late and had a nervous breakdown. Gradually her behavior became more erratic and obsessive, and the Fitzgeralds' relationship more strained. Zelda spent the next decade in and out of mental hospitals, including Johns Hopkins in Baltimore; Craig House in Beacon, New York; and Prangins Clinic in Switzerland. During one hospital stay, she wrote her only novel, "Save Me the Waltz", which was published in 1932. She also painted throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Though a woman of exceptional energy and ability, her doctors' failure to diagnose her mental disability, as well as the demise of her marriage, took its toll on her talent, and, as a result, Zelda published only a handful of articles and short stories in her lifetime. Her husband eventually moved to Hollywood to become a screenwriter, and died of a heart attack in his mistress' (Sheilah Graham) home. Eight years later, Zelda died in a fire while staying at the Highland mental facility in Asheville, North Carolina.
At the age of 27, Zelda decided to pursue her lifelong dream of becoming a professional ballerina, and began to study ballet in Paris. However, after two years of dedication, she realized she had started the pursuit of dance too late and had a nervous breakdown. Gradually her behavior became more erratic and obsessive, and the Fitzgeralds' relationship more strained. Zelda spent the next decade in and out of mental hospitals, including Johns Hopkins in Baltimore; Craig House in Beacon, New York; and Prangins Clinic in Switzerland. During one hospital stay, she wrote her only novel, "Save Me the Waltz", which was published in 1932. She also painted throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Though a woman of exceptional energy and ability, her doctors' failure to diagnose her mental disability, as well as the demise of her marriage, took its toll on her talent, and, as a result, Zelda published only a handful of articles and short stories in her lifetime. Her husband eventually moved to Hollywood to become a screenwriter, and died of a heart attack in his mistress' (Sheilah Graham) home. Eight years later, Zelda died in a fire while staying at the Highland mental facility in Asheville, North Carolina.
