Some critics say F. Scott Fitzgerald is the greatest American novelist, though my 11^th grade English class would not agree. I am pretty sure I was the only one who liked reading The Great Gatsby. What I didn’t know then was that the leading lady, Daisy Buchanan, was heavily based on Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda. He wrote her as the original flapper of America’s Jazz Age. In the novel and in life, that role turned out to be less glamorous than expected, so fair warning: some of this story is hard to hear.

A Southern Belle

Zelda was born in the excitement of a new century, on July 24, 1900, in Montgomery, Alabama. She was pretty and vivacious and as a teenager kept a string of men dangling after her. There were plenty of men available to dangle because World War I was on, and Montgomery hosted a training base. 30,000 men flooded into town (Encyclopedia of Alabama).

Zelda met Lieutenant F. Scott Fitzgerald at a dance in July 1918. He intended to become “one of the greatest writers who ever lived” as he told a college friend. He also wanted a “top girl” to share a fairytale life with him (Bryer, 3).

Zelda was his idea of a top girl, but competition was stiff. Trainee pilots were performing stunts over her house to impress her (Bryer, 4). Every one of these many young men could easily be dead in France in a matter of weeks or months, so it was an enjoy-life-while-you-can atmosphere.

Scott did not die in France. The war was over before he was deployed. In other good news, Zelda preferred him to all her other young men, but he soon found that the business of living had downsides too. Specifically, that it costs money.

Scott wanted to write novels, but he moved to New York to get a newspaper job so he could marry Zelda. When the newspapers didn’t want him, he had to sink still lower into advertising. This was not the fairy tale life he had imagined (Bryer, 4-5).

Zelda wanted to marry him. She says so in her letters. She was delighted to receive his engagement ring in the mail (Bryer, 18), but she gushed about it less than she did about the pajamas he sent her, which she said were “the most adorably moon-shiny things on earth—I  feel like a Vogue cover in ‘em—I do wish yours were touching” (Bryer, 14).

In between her expressions of love, devotion, and moonshine, Zelda’s letters were full of references to her social engagements with various men, including an actor who offered an arrangement like marriage, only without the legal obligation part. Her comment to Scott was “I can’t ignore physical characteristics enough to elope with a positive ape” (Bryer, 28).

You can imagine the effect this was having on her increasingly depressed fiancé. The question is whether or not she intended that effect, and your guess is as good as mine. She was young, possibly thoughtless, but also possibly playing the only game she had been taught to play. No one, least of all herself, had made provisions for the possibility that she might someday need or want a career. The only question in life was which man would provide for her?

Zelda broke the engagement. Scott gave up his New York job in disgust, moved back to his parents’ house, and wrote a novel, which a publisher accepted. He visited Zelda again and the engagement was back on. This Side of Paradise was published March 26, 1920. Zelda and Scott were married one week later at St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.

A Young, Glamorous Couple

The book sold very, very well. Scott’s fairy tale had come true. He was a great writer. He had his top girl. The money flowed in. Which was good because neither Scott nor Zelda had any talent for poverty. They humble-bragged about that. Scott wrote a friend that Zelda was “very beautiful and very wise, and very brave as you can imagine—but she’s a perfect baby and a more irresponsible pair than we’ll be will be hard to imagine” (Bruccoli, 64).

The Roaring Twenties had just begun, and Zelda and Scott were in the glamorous heart of New York, enjoying their newfound celebrity. There were many parties, one of them so raucous that management kicked them out of their lodgings (Bryer, 51). Magazine articles touted Zelda as the original flapper, the one who defined the role (Bruccoli, 105).

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Zelda deliberately cultivated her reputation for both loving luxuries and for being useless. For example, when asked to contribute to a collection of recipes from famous women, here is what she sent in:

“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” (Bruccoli, 106).

Whether Zelda was really that helpless, or whether it just made good copy, I don’t know.

When their daughter Scottie was born, Zelda’s comment was “I hope it’s beautiful and a fool—a beautiful little fool.” These are words Scott wrote down and later put in the mouth of Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby (Bryer, 54). I’m not entirely sure what Zelda meant by them. Was she being ironic? Was she acting a part? Had she acted a part for so long she believed it herself?

By 1922, Zelda also began to publish stories and articles. She was very witty, and a beautiful writer herself. For example, after Scott published a novel called The Beautiful and the Damned, she wrote a tongue-in-cheek review. She says “I have been asked to analyze [the book] carefully in the light of my brilliant critical insight, my tremendous erudition and my vast impressive partiality. Here I go!”

She goes on to say that everyone should buy the book. Why? Because there’s a store on 42^nd Street that has a really cute gold dress she would like to buy. Also, the book has valuable life lessons, like “what to do when cast off by a grandfather.”

But she does have some criticisms, like the literary references, which “reminds me in its more soggy moments of the essays I used to get up in school at the last minute by looking up strange names in the Encyclopedia Britannica”. Also:

“It seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, 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” (Bruccoli, 100).

Scott thought this was hilarious. That plagiarism crack might not have been a joke, but he didn’t know it yet.

The Problems Begin to Surface

The problems were already beginning to surface. Scott did earn money, but not as much as they spent. They together decided to abort their second child (and possibly more after that), but the methods caused Zelda serious health problems, and the both of them later regretted that choice (Cline, 125-126, 187).

In 1924, they moved because post-war Europe was cheap, but it turned out that you can still live beyond your means even when rent is cheap. Scott drank heavily, and Zelda had a flirtation that may have been more than a flirtation (there’s no good evidence either way). It still devastated Scott (Bryer, 56). The fact that he had flirted with girls (and more than just flirted, at times) himself did not seem relevant. There were many loud arguments and dramatic scenes, all of them soaked in alcohol.

It was in this mood that Scott wrote The Great Gatsby. It’s a tale of glitz and youth and money and love, none of which matters in the end. He was clearly seeing the holes in his lifestyle.

Zelda was feeling the change as well. In 1925, she published an article on the demise of the flapper. She had been married for only five years, but her tone has changed from irresponsible young person to matron. She says:

“We are not accustomed to having our daughters think for themselves … I do not think that anything my daughter could possibly do eighteen years from now would surprise me. And yet I will probably be forbidding her in frigid tones to fly more than 3,000 feet high or more than five hundred miles an hour… and bidding her never to go near that horrible Mars” (Bruccoli, 133).

Perhaps in an attempt to feel younger than she was, Zelda decided to have a career in ballet. She had always loved dance, but now she threw herself into training with a fervor that seemed deranged to outside observers, including Scott. At Zelda’s age, many ballet pros are planning their retirement, not beginning serious study. Zelda was diagnosed in her own lifetime with schizophrenia, but some later researchers think bipolar would be more accurate. If so, then this was a manic phase. Scott knew nothing of the medical issues, but he knew that her intense devotion to ballet was exhausting her. And him. And their daughter, Scottie.

But Zelda could not be dissuaded. Marriage and motherhood had not fulfilled her, and writing did not either, possibly because publishers often wanted the byline to say by F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, even when Scott had written not a word of it (Bryer, 59). Meanwhile, her stories sold well at a time when Scott was locked in alcohol-induced writer’s block. As so often happens, the wife’s success was just what an insecure husband needed to feel even more insecure.

Scott was full of self-loathing. He wrote to Hemingway that:

“my latest tendency is to collapse about 11:00 and, with the tears flowing from my eyes or the gin rising to their level and leaking over, and tell interested friends or acquaintances that I haven’t a friend in the world and likewise care for nobody, generally including Zelda, and often implying current company—after which the current company tend to become less current… [W]hen drunk I make them all pay and pay and pay” (Bryer, 61).

There is no doubt that he made Zelda pay. But there is also no doubt that she also also was hard to live with. By her own admission, she also drank too much and said too much (Mellow, 296). According to Scott, she criticized Scott’s sexual abilities and also his ability to make money (Cline, 187). Once while Scott was driving, she grabbed the steering wheel and tried to drive it off a cliff (Bryer, 61). At a party she flung herself down a flight of ten stone steps (Cline, 183). She was later to describe herself as a megalomaniac (Bryer, 82). Also that she walked in black horror, incapable of focusing her attention (Bryer, 83). She also wrote, it was “ghastly losing your mind and not being able to see clearly, literally or figuratively—and knowing that you can’t think and that nothing is right, not even your comprehension of concrete things like how old you are or what you look like” (Bryer, 89).

Her mental breakdown became clinical in April 1930. She was not quite 30 years old.

Alcoholism and Schizophrenia

Some of the letters between Scott and Zelda while she was hospitalized contain bitter recriminations on both sides. Anyone who wants to say that Zelda went crazy because of Scott’s selfishness has plenty of ammunition in those letters. Anyone who wants to say Scott drank because of Zelda’s selfishness also has plenty of ammunition.

More recent medical scholarship says that alcoholism, schizophrenia, and bipolar are diseases with strong genetic components. They are not caused by your spouse’s behavior, no matter how atrocious that behavior is. Atrocious behavior just adds to the misery.

Some sources excoriate Scott, but I do wonder whether those writers have ever lived with someone with a severe mental illness. It’s disorienting and baffling, and he had no modern guidelines or support groups to help him. His behavior was terrible, yes, but neither did he give up. He promoted Zelda’s writing (Bryer, 81). He stayed in hotels near her clinic and sent flowers every other day. He insisted on the best care possible and scrounged the money for it (Bryer, 77-78, 98).

Months later, when Zelda was well enough to leave the clinic, Scott wrote a friend that “Zelda is well, thank God, and is writing some amazing stuff” (Bryer, 112). They moved to Montgomery, Alabama, not far from Zelda’s parents. The idea was peace, quiet, sobriety, family support, and a new novel from Scott.

But it was 1931. The Depression was on, money was tight, so when Hollywood said they’d hire Scott for six weeks to write a screenplay, he went to California and did it. He hated it. This was not peace and quiet and a new novel. It was parties and alcohol and collaborative writing (Bryer, 113). With money in the bank, he returned home and planned (again) to write his new novel.

Zelda had written him beautiful, supportive letters while he was gone, but now her mental health broke down again. By February 1932, Zelda was at a psychiatric clinic in Baltimore.

Within a month, Zelda completed her own self-analysis and without the help of any psychiatrist. She did it by writing her own highly autobiographical novel called Save Me the Waltz. Her heroine is Alabama Beggs, a Southern belle who marries an artist, strives for a career in ballet, feels stifled in her marriage, spends years in France, has a break down, returns home, and realizes her parents might have been right all along. The fictional veneer is thin.

Zelda mailed this manuscript to Scott’s publisher, without telling him. His response earned him the ire of generations of feminists because he told his publisher not to read or consider Zelda’s book until it was heavily revised by him.

That a husband would actively try to sabotage his wife’s success is unpardonable. I fully agree with the feminists that far. But it’s more complicated than that.

Scott did not object to Zelda writing in general. He certainly thought it was a better idea than ballet. What upset him was this particular novel.

He had spent the past four years trying to write a novel that would be as popular as This Side of Paradise. The one that would restore him to glory and the family to wealth. One of several reasons he still hadn’t finished this novel was that he had frantically churned out short stories and screenplays because he desperately needed immediate money to pay Zelda’s medical bills. Even so, he had written some of his novel, and he had read long passages aloud to Zelda.

For Zelda to lounge around in a clinic with zero responsibilities and then churn out a novel that was (in his mind) a direct copy of his work-in-progress was intolerable. Plagiarism begins at home, indeed. By the time his book was finished and published, it would look like a copy of hers, instead of the other way around. She had even named her leading man the same as his autobiographical character in This Side of Paradise. Scott wrote:

“[This] puts me in an absurd and Zelda in a ridiculous position… Using the name of a character I invented to put intimate facts in the hands of friends and enemies we have accumulated enroute—My God, my books made her a legend and her single intention in this somewhat thin portrait is to make me a non-entity. That’s why she sent the book directly to New York” (Bryer, 165).

This explanation is what Scott gave to others, and we have recorded in writing. Her side of the story is far less clear.

Her letter to him starts out very conciliatory. “Of course, I glad[ly] submit to anything you want about the book or anything else.” But only a few sentences later, she contradicts herself and says, “However, I would like you to thoroughly understand that my revision will be made on an aesthetic basis: that the other material which I will elect is nevertheless legitimate stuff and has cost me a pretty emotional penny to amass.” She goes on for a while about future books she plans to write an equally sensitive topics, then changes the subject entirely and ends “With dearest love, I am your irritated Zelda” (Bryer, 166-167).

As far as I can tell, Zelda does not ever clearly lay out her point of view in writing. My secondary sources mostly muddy it further, while finding their own reasons for Zelda to complain. Admittedly, it isn’t hard. How could it be copying to write about experiences that were as much hers as they were his? (Even Scott granted this.) If money and reputation were at stake for him, was that not also true of her? In the past, Scott had portrayed her in fiction as beautiful and desirable, and maybe that was okay. But his new work put her mental illness on public display and that was totally different. One source (Cline) goes so far as to assert that her second mental breakdown was precisely because he read her those passages from his work in progress. I’m pretty sure that’s pure speculation, but it’s more than possible that it never even occurred to Scott to ask if she was okay with his portrayal of her. Whereas she deliberately avoided asking if he was okay with her portrayal of him. Clearly the answer was no.

To me, there’s an easy solution here: maybe nobody should be writing autobiographical fiction. Your story is never your story alone. It’s also your family’s story. But that’s not what happened, and scholars get to argue over who behaved worse, while Zelda and Scott simply worked out a compromise. Zelda made revisions and Scott pronounced it a fine novel (Bryer, 146). She published first. Scott had angrily insisted that half the proceeds go to paying down family debt, and some of my sources use that as another strike against him, but in the end it didn’t matter. The book didn’t earn enough money to have any appreciable difference on the family finances (Cline, 309).

The Gathering Gloom

In 1932, Zelda left the clinic and they spent another year and a half as a family. Friends reported they were devoted to each other, but also that Scott drank a lot and Zelda resented his attempts to control her schedule and her writing. He thought it wasn’t control but helping her avoiding the behavior that had led to previous breakdowns. Things like regular exercise, coming out of her room to play with Scottie, and reasonable bedtimes (Bryer, 171, 176). He had doctor’s orders to back him up, but it didn’t go over well, and it’s true enough that Scott could be cruel and dictatorial even when he was sober, which he often wasn’t (Cline, 324-333).

In 1934, Zelda collapsed again. She was hospitalized when Scott’s novel Tender Is the Night came out. It was the one he had pinned all his hopes on, and those hopes were completely dashed (Bryer, 186-190).

Zelda’s letters are a far cry from what they were in her first clinic. She commiserated with him over the failure of his book and expressed hope for their future (Bryer 193). But in between letters she was hallucinating, or incoherent, or sitting in depressive silence (Bryer, 198). How much of this was caused by her treatment, rather than her illness, is beyond me to determine.

Scott still made time to push his publisher to do a book of Zelda’s collected short stories (Bryer, 203), and he struggled on with his own writing, but in truth, he was collapsing under the strain. He was in and out of the hospital himself.

In 1937, Hollywood made him an offer he couldn’t afford to turn down. He moved to California. Zelda stayed in a clinic in North Carolina. Scottie was at boarding school.  

In 1939, Scott’s alcoholism was worse than ever when he flew from California to pick Zelda up and take her on a vacation to Cuba. It was a good thought, but it was disastrous. He was drunk the whole time. Zelda managed to get him back to New York and hospitalized before returning to her own hospital. They did not know it was the last time they would see each other.

The Final Year

In some ways, the letters of this last year are the most beautiful. The overemotional lushness of their youthful writing was over. These were two people tormented by their own demons. They had both failed each other in catastrophic ways. And yet Scott could still write to Zelda about his guilt over the Cuba trip and say:

“You were a peach throughout the whole trip and there isn’t a minute of it when I don’t think of you with all the old tenderness… You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, most beautiful person I have ever known, but even that is an understatement because the length that you went to there at the end would have tried anybody beyond endurance” (Bryer, 283).

And Zelda wrote to him that:

“Dearest: I am always grateful for all the loyalties you gave me, and I am always loyal to the concepts that held us to-gether so long… And I love, always your fine writing talent, your tolerance and generosity; and all your happy endowments. Nothing could have survived our life. Devotedly, and always with my deepest gratitude, Zelda” (Bryer, 277).

When they were young, they had hoped for a fairy tale. Miraculously, something of that fairy tale was still there, even though they lived on opposite sides of the continent, even though she was imprisoned by doctors and he was imprisoned by debt and alcoholism. Also continuing infidelity. The woman Scott was living with did not know he still wrote love letters to his wife (Cline, 368).

They never got the chance to be old. Scott died of a heart attack at the age of 44. Zelda died seven years later, locked in her hospital room, as the building burned down.

I wish I could wrap this up with some kind of satisfying conclusion, but quite honestly, I’m struggling to find one. Much like The Great Gatsby, this story ends feeling sort of tragically futile. Scott had written that book years earlier, and somehow he and Zelda managed to live it too.

Selected Sources

Bruccoli, Matthew Joseph, Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, and Joan Paterson Kerr. The Romantic Egoists : A Pictorial Autobiography from the Scrapbooks and Albums of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Columbia: University Of South Carolina Press, 2003.

Bryer, Jackson R., and Cathy W. Barks, eds. Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda : The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. New York: Scribner, 2019.

Cline, Sally. Zelda Fitzgerald : Her Voice in Paradise. London: John Murray, 2002.

Encyclopedia of Alabama. “Camp Sheridan.” Accessed May 26, 2025. https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/camp-sheridan/.