book review a novel of zelda fitzgerald

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Beautiful and Damned

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By Penelope Green

• April 19, 2013

They were, arguably, the first celebrity couple of the modern age, Jazz-era avatars running wild in a new century. She was a precocious, spoiled Southern belle and bad girl; he was a Midwesterner and Princeton dropout who had turned his experience into the novel “This Side of Paradise.” In the 1920s, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald careered through New York City and Great Neck, Paris and the South of France, leaving in their wake a trail of splintered Champagne glasses and glittering bons mots. Their tragic, slow-motion falls — she to madness and a series of mental institutions, he to alcohol and an indifferent public — seemed inevitable, and drawn from the pages of one of his novels. She was reckless to the point of oddity; he always drank like a professional, collapsing the arc from charming to churlish early on.

But theirs was surely one of the most fascinating literary and romantic partnerships, symbiotic to the point of cannibalism, with Scott drawing freely from Zelda’s diaries, letters and experiences (including her treatment for mental illness) for his own work. In a review of “The Beautiful and Damned” coyly commissioned as a publicity stunt by The New York Tribune, Zelda wrote, “Mr. Fitzgerald — I believe that is how he spells his name — seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.” But Zelda wrote stories, too — some were published under both their names (better for sales) in popular magazines of the day — as well as plays and, later, a thinly veiled autobiographical novel called “Save Me the Waltz.” This she banged out in two months during a stay at a Maryland mental institution, enraging her husband not only because of the speed with which she produced the book, but also because its themes — a married couple in free-fall; a wife hospitalized — were those of the novel he was trying to write (“Tender Is the Night”), and she’d beat him to the finish line.

The Fitzgeralds turned out so much copy about themselves, fictional and otherwise, that biographers have been able to serve them up every which way — with Zelda providing a particularly juicy and complex meal. Feminist icon? Check. Infamous nag and emasculator? Check (see Hemingway’s “Moveable Feast” for a singularly vicious rendition). As it happens, Zelda fits quite nicely into the pantheon of difficult and intriguing women like Frances Farmer, Marilyn Monroe and even Elizabeth Wurtzel.

Was she an artist in her own right, or just artistic? (“Mr. Fitzgerald is a novelist and Mrs. Fitzgerald is a novelty,” Ring Lardner wrote.) Was she really schizophrenic? Did she suffer from borderline personality disorder, or was she bipolar, as contemporary psychiatrists like Peter Kramer have argued? Was she truly mentally ill, or a victim of a controlling, alcoholic husband and a patriarchal society? Perhaps her treatment did her in; her maladies were diagnosed in psychiatry’s infancy and subjected, as so many were in those days, to blunt instruments — insulin, electroshock therapy and extended stays in mental institutions.

What is indisputable is that she was a personality , a woman with her own very distinct voice — passionate, sometimes chaotically allusive, always vivid. Zelda has been catnip to writers for decades, beginning in 1970 with Nancy Milford’s excellent and exhaustive biography. In 2007, “Alabama Song,” a French novel about Zelda, won the Prix Goncourt, France’s biggest literary prize.

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Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

Written by Therese Anne Fowler Review by Sarah Johnson

An intimate portrait of a flamboyantly public marriage, Z imagines Zelda Fitzgerald’s voice in this exhilarating account of a life lived in decadent, full color. During the Jazz Age, Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald personified the era’s reckless abandon. Their decades-long love story played out in New York and Europe as they attended parties, spent wads of cash, and fought their inner demons and each other as they struggled to create art of their own. Their union derailed into excessive drinking (his), mental illness (hers), and mutual accusations of thwarted ambition. It’s clear from the beginning that the momentum could never have lasted, but the telling makes for great escapism.

Zelda narrates her own tale, beginning as an uninhibited Alabama teenager and moving through her marriage to an ambitious, as-yet-unknown writer, their years of notoriety, the birth of daughter Scottie, and their final tragic decline. Perhaps Fowler has filed some edges off the real Zelda’s personality to make her more sympathetic, but her daring and confidence still leap from the page.

The characterization avoids stereotypes, and all the name-dropping is done with purpose. Their social circle includes H. L. Mencken, Cole Porter, and Ernest Hemingway, the latter an attention-seeking “extra-manly man” whose complicated relationship with both Fitzgeralds is envisioned brilliantly (and controversially, no doubt). No major segments of their marriage are omitted, but the plot has a constant forward motion that ensures the reading is never dull.

The novel deftly explores the uneasy intersections between literature and real life, with Zelda embodying the brashness and style of Scott’s flapper heroines, and Zelda’s uphill battle for artistic acceptance is convincing and heartfelt. To earn them more money, her published writings were often credited at least partially to him, which she was deeply conflicted about – understandably so. With her engrossing novel about an unconventional heroine, Fowler makes a persuasive case that Zelda deserves to stand in her own spotlight.

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Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

• Therese Anne Fowler
• St. Martin’s Press
• Reviewed by Tina Irgang
• April 24, 2013

The artistic, influential and complicated marriage of the Fitzgeralds, told through Zelda’s eyes.

Therese Anne Fowler will be appearing at the Gaithersburg Book Festival , May 18, 2013.

“It seemed to Alabama that, reaching her goal, she would drive the devils that had driven her — that, in proving herself, she would achieve that peace which she imagined went only in surety of one’s self.” 

In this quote from Zelda Fitzgerald’s novel, Save Me the Waltz , lies Zelda herself as presented in Therese Anne Fowler’s Z — a woman increasingly tormented by her seeming inability to achieve her artistic goals independently of her famous husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald. 

The lives of both Fitzgeralds have been shrouded in the nostalgic mist now associated with the Jazz Age (a phrase coined, as Fowler points out, by F. Scott Fitzgerald himself) and the group of artists, writers and intellectuals that gathered around Scott and Zelda in absinthe-drenched Paris salons. However, it’s safe to assume that F. Scott Fitzgerald was not an easy man to live with — he often drowned his creative doubts in champagne and vodka and ultimately doubted whether he’d succeeded in carving out for himself the place in American letters he’d set out to claim.

We can be less sure of Zelda. Depending on who tells the tale, she held Scott back from greater success during his lifetime or steered him to the ones he did achieve. Fowler doesn’t settle that question conclusively (and perhaps it’s impossible to do so), but she does make the point that Zelda was a talented, ambitious artist in her own right. An accomplished dancer, a promising painter and a daring writer — none of which was enough to step out of Scott’s shadow.

To remedy this, Fowler sets out on an ambitious mission: To tell Zelda’s side of the story throughout the entire Fitzgerald marriage — all 20-odd rushing, confusing, desperate years of it. 

But that very ambition ultimately defeats this attempt to make us understand the complicated woman Zelda Fitzgerald was, and the even more complicated relationship she had with her husband. The Fitzgeralds’ lives were filled to the brim with parties, friends, grand artistic ambitions and larger-than-life feelings. Trying to condense the entirety of that experience into less than 400 pages is a near impossibility.

In the book’s best moments, most of which are clustered early on in the story, its frantic pace puts readers in Zelda’s place — swept off our carefree, teenaged feet by a dashing young officer who promises to show us the world. But as the narrative progresses, we’re increasingly holding on for dear life, trying to keep up with the relentless pace of names and places flashing by us without gaining much definition. Stein, Dos Passos, Paris, New York, Mencken, Antibes, Baltimore.

As a result, we find ourselves grasping for the meaning of the events in Zelda’s life. This becomes most obvious towards the end of the book, when a man dear to Zelda dies. This death is described as a crushing blow, as surely it must have been, but as readers, we’re left unsure what to make of it because we never really got to meet that man and experience what he meant to Zelda. What’s more, with the book near the end of its frenzied race to the finish line, Zelda’s reaction to the news is told in no more than two pages.

The same problem also eventually makes itself felt in Fowler’s portrait of the Fitzgerald marriage. Early on in the book, Fowler takes the time to explore how Scott and Zelda find their footing with each other in the early years of their marriage — how they relish and even cultivate their newfound notoriety as New York’s “It” couple. 

But as the years go by and the book gathers speed, we understand the dynamics of their relationship less and less. To some extent, this is unavoidable. We experience the Fitzgeralds’ marriage falling apart through Zelda’s eyes, meaning Scott’s behavior must of necessity be puzzling sometimes. But throughout the last 100 or so pages of the book, the Fitzgeralds’ encounters have become so brief and disjointed that we’re left confused about what motivates their actions at this point in their relationship.

All this is not to say that Fowler’s intention to tell Zelda’s side of the story isn’t worthy of celebration. When she succeeds, the book is terrific fun. We can’t help but fall in love with the young Zelda, whom Fowler portrays as a strong, independent-minded woman who dares the world to stand in her way. And for anyone truly interested in puzzling out the mystery of Zelda Fitzgerald, these glimpses of her make the book worth reading despite its shortcomings.

And after all, there is a certain poetry in the fact that a book about the Fitzgeralds sets out with grand ambitions, sweeps us up in its giddy wake, but ultimately collapses under its own weight. 

Tina Irgang is a full-time editor for a business-to-business publishing company. When she’s not writing or editing, she reads anything and everything.

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Reviewed: Z: a novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler

Past infidelity.

By Sarah Churchwell

Z: a novel of Zelda Fitzgerald Therese Anne Fowler Two Roads, 384pp, £17.99

In 1923, T S Eliot wrote that the critic must have “a very highly developed sense of fact”. This is also a useful attribute for the historical novelist but it is precisely what is missing from Therese Anne Fowler’s fictional account of the life of Zelda Fitzgerald, which is less a fiction than a series of falsities.

Fowler’s novel retells the story of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, from their courtship in Montgomery, Alabama at the end of the First World War, through Scott’s sudden fame as the bestselling author of This Side of Paradise in 1920 and their marriage a week later. The Fitzgeralds proceeded to take America by storm, while their well-publicised escapades in the early 1920s helped to inspire The Great Gatsby. After it was published in 1925 to disappointing sales and mostly uncomprehending reviews, the fun began to spiral into something more destructive. Fitzgerald’s drinking raged out of control and Zelda’s behaviour, always unpredictable, started to become seriously erratic.

In 1930, Zelda had a mental breakdown, and was hospitalised. She spent the next decade in and out of psychiatric clinics, while Fitzgerald’s alcoholism took a stranglehold over his life. Recriminations were thrown, Zelda’s friends and family murmuring that Scott was to blame – he had driven her crazy, or else was a jazz-age Mr Rochester locking up an inconvenient Bertha Mason. In fact, there is a great deal of epistolary evidence to show that Fitzgerald was desperate to find a cure for the woman he loved until he died suddenly of a heart attack in 1940.

Zelda was in and out of hospital for the next eight years but conspiracy theories are nothing if not resourceful: and so we are told that it was the treatments to which she was subjected that drove Zelda mad. It’s a tiresome story but tenacious, and unfortunately one to which Fowler whole-heartedly subscribes – the kind of victim feminism that can only see women as casualties and martyrs of selfish, domineering men, rather than as agents of their own destinies.

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The truth, evident from the accounts of virtually everyone who knew them and from their own writings, is that both Scott and Zelda were brilliant, beautiful, charming, egotistical, theatrical, impetuous and selfdestructive; and they loved each other deeply, to the ends of their lives. “We ruined ourselves – I have never honestly thought that we ruined each other,” Scott wrote to Zelda soon after her breakdown. But Fowler knows better.

The emphasis in Z, an afterword tells us, “is not on factual minutiae but rather on the emotional journey of the characters”. Fowler certainly pays little attention to facts: names are wrong throughout (Tallulah Bankhead was called “Dutch”, not “Tallu”; Edna St Vincent Millay was “Vincent”, not “Edna”; Alexander Woollcott was “Alec”, not “Alexander”), as are easily checked dates (Fitzgerald’s play The Vegetable flopped in November 1923, not 1922). Relationships are rewritten: Fitzgerald quarrelled with Alec McKaig in March 1922, ending the friendship, so the Fitzgeralds should not be meeting “our beloved Alec McKaig” in Paris in 1925. The Black Bottom was not later “called” the Charleston; they are two different dances. Anachronistic language abounds: people in the 1920s did not say “come on” or “when he does shit like that”.

Defending such errors as the poetic license of the novelist is a prevarication: sloppiness is not art. Historical fiction can imaginatively fill gaps in historical knowledge, bringing the past intimately to life, or it can rewrite history, as a counterfactual. It’s not clear what virtue there might be to getting the known facts wrong, however, and most of what Fowler invents goes against the letter or the spirit of what we do know.              

This is true not only in the case of factual “minutiae” but also in terms of the larger emotional lives of the characters that Fowler claims concerned her more. It is precisely Zelda’s character that Fowler fails to respect or to capture, turning one of the most memorable women of her era into a sanctimonious bore, with decidedly 21st-century attitudes to monogamy, work, alcohol and child-rearing. Fowler’s Zelda is driven to exhibitionistic behaviour only by “the need to take some kind of action, even if it was wrong”, once tossing her lace knickers on to a lunch table.

The real Zelda was famous for throwing off her clothes at the drop of a hat, for dancing on tabletops and necking with men at parties, inviting them to take baths with her and reportedly chasing the 16-year-old brother of one party host up the stairs, none of which appears in Fowler’s account. Nor was there ever any suggestion that she regarded such antics as “wrong”. Indeed, conventional moralising was anathema to Zelda. It is simply absurd to suggest, as Fowler does, that Zelda would have been shocked to hear that Scott got drunk and “exposed himself” at a party. The real Zelda would be insulted at being portrayed as a prim Victorian maiden.

Fowler’s Zelda keeps preaching moderation and prudence in a way that would have made the historical Zelda hoot with laughter. She urges Scott to spend less and drink less. But Zelda’s own letters at the time admit with casual insouciance how much she’s been drinking, what she’s been buying, how much fun they’ve been having, very rarely mention their small daughter (who is, naturally, a subject of proper maternal devotion in Fowler’s banal imaginings) and never assert the need for temperance until after her breakdown.

On the contrary – in the summer of 1923, she wrote to a friend complaining that Scott had started on his novel and had retired into a monastic life, which Zelda was finding very boring. Fowler’s Zelda is horrified when Scott contemplates working on Gatsby after he’s had a drink; the historical Zelda embarked on an affair while Scott was working on his masterpiece because she was bored.

Needless to say, Fowler also thinks that Zelda was the artist in the family. Scott begins as a cynical self-publicist, and ends a sodden mess. It’s amazing that the unpleasant cretin in these pages could produce anything, much less The Great Gatsby. But happily he had Zelda’s constant, wifely support. Zelda comes up with the title for Gatsby and helps Scott write The Vegetable (an unfortunate credit for a champion of Zelda to offer, given that the play was Fitzgerald’s greatest professional failure).

Fowler can’t even grant that Scott was the one who kept a ledger; Zelda does that too. Even more ironically, although apparently convinced that Zelda was the greater writer, Fowler entirely fails to evoke her remarkable, imagistic voice. Zelda wrote in her autobiographical novel, Save Me the Waltz : “Possessing a rapacious, engulfing ego their particular genius swallowed their world in its swift undertow and washed its cadavers out to sea. New York is a good place to be on the upgrade.”Fowler’s Zelda thinks: “The building was a wonder. Everything in New York City was a wonder, including Scott, who was treating me like the princess I’d once imagined I was.”

Writers of historical novels owe a debt to the facts that have inspired their fictions: Fowler wants to capitalise on the facts but feels no obligation to them. Where there is so little fidelity to the known facts, there can be no meaningful notion of history, no imaginative supplementing of incomplete stories, and the “minutiae” about which Fowler is so dismissive cannot be transcended. Certainly no sense of truth, history or fiction can flourish in a space that has no sense of fact.

Sarah Churchwell’s “Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby” is published by Little, Brown on 6 June

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Review: Z - A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, By Therese Anne Fowler

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If ever a couple crossed the boundaries of representation and became an era, it was F Scott Fitzgerald and his glamorous "flapper" wife, Zelda. They were the Jazz Age. But in closing the gap between representation and "being", they found themselves without the necessary distance to remain whole. Scott would die an alcoholic at 40; Zelda would be incinerated in a fire at a sanatorium.

This question of representation is crucial for Therese Anne Fowler's often superb novel. She makes excellent use of Zelda's biographical details, and pays close attention to the different arguments about Zelda's life with Scott: did she, as Hemingway always insisted, bring her husband down? Or was she, as recent biographers claim, the victim of a controlling husband jealous of her artistic talents?

Fowler's Zelda begins sassy and sure in her home town of Montgomery, where she is the star attraction, never short of boyfriends. Yankee soldier Scott sees her dancing and asks her out. But their courtship is not without problems, partly because her father disapproves and partly because Scott is an unsuccessful writer, unable to support her.

The publication of This Side of Paradise changes all that. Money flowed in and the endless round of wild parties began. Fowler attributes the ceaseless socialising to Scott's need to make friends with the world. But Zelda begins to quieten down and look for something to do, especially after the birth of their daughter, Scottie. She takes art and ballet lessons; writes short stories that get published under Scott's name. We witness Scott's slow descent into drunkenness, and Zelda, bored and isolated, having an affair. Then comes the slide into madness.

At this point, though, the novel weakens. Anyone who has read Zelda's letters and prose will be aware of the jaggedness in her soul – this woman was a handful; she wasn't just playing when she slid down banisters or jumped into fountains. There's a desperation and an edge which can render her unsympathetic. But Fowler's Zelda is largely shorn of these trickier psychological aspects. She gives us Zelda at her best, as a beautiful young thing who becomes aware of women's issues; who is confident, strong and funny. Her mental collapse and her later years are minimised.

Fowler has peeked behind the curtain, but she prefers the show. The difference between the two is slight, but it is real and it is important.

Two Roads £14.99

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Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald (Fowler)

Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald Therese Anne Fowler, 2013 St. Martin's Press 384 pp. ISBN-13: 9781250028655 Summary I wish I could tell everyone who thinks we’re ruined, Look closer...and you’ll see something extraordinary, mystifying, something real and true. We have never been what we seemed . When beautiful, reckless Southern belle Zelda Sayre meets F. Scott Fitzgerald at a country club dance in 1918, she is seventeen years old and he is a young army lieutenant stationed in Alabama. Before long, the “ungettable” Zelda has fallen for him despite his unsuitability: Scott isn’t wealthy or prominent or even a Southerner, and keeps insisting, absurdly, that his writing will bring him both fortune and fame. Her father is deeply unimpressed. But after Scott sells his first novel, This Side of Paradise, to Scribner’s, Zelda optimistically boards a train north, to marry him in the vestry of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and take the rest as it comes. What comes, here at the dawn of the Jazz Age, is unimagined attention and success and celebrity that will make Scott and Zelda legends in their own time. Everyone wants to meet the dashing young author of the scandalous novel—and his witty, perhaps even more scandalous wife. Zelda bobs her hair, adopts daring new fashions, and revels in this wild new world. Each place they go becomes a playground: New York City, Long Island, Hollywood, Paris, and the French Riviera—where they join the endless party of the glamorous, sometimes doomed Lost Generation that includes Ernest Hemingway, Sara and Gerald Murphy, and Gertrude Stein. Everything seems new and possible. Troubles, at first, seem to fade like morning mist. But not even Jay Gatsby’s parties go on forever. Who is Zelda, other than the wife of a famous—sometimes infamous—husband? How can she forge her own identity while fighting her demons and Scott’s, too? With brilliant insight and imagination, Therese Anne Fowler brings us Zelda’s irresistible story as she herself might have told it. ( From the publisher .) Read an Excerpt .

Author Bio • Birth—April 22, 1967 • Raised—Milan, Illinois, USA • Education—B.A., M.F.A., North Carolina State University • Currently—lives in Wake Forest, North Carolina Therese Anne Fowler ( pronounced ta-reece) is the author of severl books, including: A Good Neighborhood (2020), A Well Behaved Woman: A Novel of the Vanderbilts 2018),and Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald (2013). Fowler is the third child and only daughter of a couple who raised their children in Milan, Illinois. An avowed tomboy, Therese thwarted her grandmother’s determined attempts to dress her in frills—and, to further her point, insisted on playing baseball despite her town having a perfectly good girls’ softball league. A Thanks to the implementation of Title IX legislation and her father’s willingness to fight on her behalf, Therese became one of the first girls in the U.S. to play Little League baseball. Her passion for baseball was exceeded only by her love of books. A reader since age four, she often abused her library privileges by keeping favorite books out just a little too long. When domestic troubles led to unpleasant upheaval during her adolescence, the Rock Island Public Library became her refuge. With no grounding in Literature per se, she made no distinction between the classics and modern fiction. Little Women was as valued as The Dead Zone. A story’s ability to transport her, affect her, was the only relevant matter. Therese married at eighteen, becoming soon afterward a military spouse (officially referred to at the time as a "dependent spouse"). With customary spirit, she followed her then-husband to Texas, then to Clark Air Base in the Philippines—where, because of politics, very few military spouses could find employment. Again, books came to her rescue as the base library became her home-away-from-home and writers such as Jean Auel, Sidney Sheldon, and Margaret Atwood brought respite from boredom and heat. Her own foray into writing came years later, after a divorce, single parenthood, enrollment in college, and remarriage. A chance opportunity during the final semester of her undergrad program led to her writing her first short story, and she was hooked. Having won an essay contest in third grade and seen her writing praised by teachers ever since, she knew she could put words on paper reasonably well. This story, however, was her first real attempt at fiction. Her professor told her she had a knack for it, thus giving her the permission to try she hadn’t known she was waiting for. After an intensive five-year stint that included one iffy-but-completed novel followed by graduate school, some short-fiction awards, an MFA in creative writing, teaching undergraduates creative writing, and a second completed novel that led to literary representation, Therese was on the path to a writing career. It would take more writing (some of which is published) and a great deal more reading, though, before she began to grasp Literature properly–experience proving to be the best teacher. Therese has two grown sons and two nearly grown stepsons. She currently lives in North Carolina with her husband. ( Adapted from the author's website . Retrieved 2/28/2020 .)

Book Reviews With lyrical prose, Fowler's Z beautifully portrays the frenzied lives of, and complicated relationship between, Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald...This is a novel that will open readers' minds to the life of an often misunderstood woman—one not easily forgotten. RT Book Reviews Jazz Age legends F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald come into focus in Fowler’s rich debut.... Fowler is a close study of their famously tumultuous relationship, sparing no detail by following the Fitzgeralds through the less glamorous parts of their lives and the more obscure moments of history, including Zelda’s obsession with ballet and the strained relationship she had with their daughter, Scottie. Most consistently, Zelda is worried about money, her husband’s alcoholism and lack of productivity, and her own desire for recognition. Although obviously well researched, Zelda, who splashed in the Union Square fountain and sat atop taxi cabs, doesn’t have, in Fowler’s hands, the edge that history suggests. Fowler portrays a softer, more anxious Zelda, but loveable nonetheless, whose world is one of textured sensuality. Publishers Weekly Fowler won an LJ star for her 2008 debut, Souvenir , then settled comfortably into fraught contemporary relationship territory. Here she does something entirely different, reimagining the tumultuous life of Zelda Fitzgerald. A big burst of publisher enthusiasm for this book. Library Journal If you’re looking for dishy tales of crazy Zelda and drunken Scott, this isn’t your book. You get some of that, certainly, but Fowler, through meticulous research, has crafted a Zelda you might not expect: She’s complex, confused, ambitious, impulsive—and naive. BookPage ( Starred review .) Fowler’s Zelda is all we would expect and more…once she meets the handsome Scott, her life takes off on an arc of indulgence and decadence that still causes us to shake our heads in wonder…soirées with Picasso and his mistress, with Cole Porter and his wife, with Gerald and Sara Murphy, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Ezra Pound and Jean Cocteau. Scott’s friendship with Hemingway verges on a love affair—at least it’s close enough to one to make Zelda jealous. Ultimately, both of these tragic, pathetic and grand characters are torn apart by their inability to love or leave each other. Fowler has given us a lovely, sad and compulsively readable book. Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions 1. Many accounts of both Scott and Zelda contend that Zelda wouldn’t marry Scott unless he was well off—a view they themselves encouraged in the early years of their marriage. How does this play into the flapper image Zelda embodied in the ‘20s? Overall, was it harmful or beneficial to her? 2. How much of Scott’s success is owed to Zelda’s manufactured breakup with him in 1919? 3. The first time Zelda thinks she may be pregnant she refuses to pursue an abortion. Why, then, does she choose differently later on? 4. Why does Zelda have so little regard for her parents’ views and the standards by which she was raised? 5. Is Scott’s alcohol abuse a cause or a result of the life he and Zelda led and the troubles they experienced? 6. How legitimate was it for Scott and his agent, Harold Ober, to sell Zelda’s short stories under a joint by-line? 7. Which of Zelda’s talents do you feel was her truest calling? 8. How do you feel about Scott’s insistence on hiring strict nannies to care for Scottie? What benefit, or harm, may have come from this? 9. Modern psychiatrists have said that Zelda was probably troubled not with schizophrenia in its current definition but with bipolar disorder, which is characterized by dramatic mood swings and the behaviors that sometimes result. Where do you see evidence of Zelda’s illness in the years before her breakdown in early 1930? How much, if any, of her vibrant personality might be tied to the disorder? 10. What does it say about Scott that he was so highly involved in Zelda’s care during her episodes of hospitalization? 11. Why does Zelda tolerate Scott’s infatuation with actress Lois Moran and, later, columnist Sheilah Graham? 12. When Zelda says Ernest Hemingway is to blame for the disaster she and Scott made of their lives, what exactly does she mean? What might have been different for them if Hemingway hadn’t been Scott’s close friend? 13. Ernest Hemingway’s sexuality has been the subject of scrutiny by literary scholars and curious readers alike. In what ways was Zelda’s fear about the nature of Scott’s friendship with Hemingway justified? 14. Owing greatly to Ernest Hemingway’s account of her in A Moveable Feast (1964), Zelda has been seen as “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s crazy wife.” Why do you think Hemingway wrote so spitefully about her and so critically about Scott so many years after both their deaths? 15. Scott made almost all his money writing for the popular magazines (“the slicks”) and from the movie industry—and making money was essential for the lifestyle he wanted to lead. Why, then, was he forever struggling to impress the critics with more serious work? 16. Alcohol abuse and infidelity were seen as common and acceptable during the Jazz Age and among the expatriates especially. How much have views changed since then? 17. How do Sara and Gerald Murphy influence Zelda? What about Zelda’s friend Sara Haardt Mencken? 18. Despite her evolving interests and ambitions, Zelda never saw herself as a feminist. How might that view have affected her choices, both as a young woman and then later, when she aspired to dance professionally? 19.  In what ways would the Fitzgeralds’ public and private lives have been different if they’d lived in the 1960s? 1980s? Today? 20. The Great Gatsby is often said to have been modeled on the Fitzgeralds’ time in Great Neck (Long Island), New York, with Gatsby’s love for Daisy inspired by Zelda’s affair with Edouard Jozan. Where in Z do you see evidence of this? 21. Scott turns Zelda’s affair with Jozan into another Fitzgerald tale. What does this say about him? What does it say about Zelda that she allows it? 22. Though Zelda spends most of her adult life away from her family and the South, she doesn’t escape their influences. Where do you see this most vividly? ( Questions issued by publisher .)

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Word of Mouth

Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, z: a novel of zelda fitzgerald.

Narrator Jenna Lamia's soft Southern accent and languid tone immediately set the mood for this first-person fictional account of Zelda's marriage with F. Scott Fitzgerald, the great American novelist. Lamia's subtle intonations telegraph the young girl's humor and spunk as the newlyweds embrace all that is new and smart, partying their way from New York to Paris and befriending artists, musicians, and writers. But by the end of the 1920s, Zelda's world begins to crumble, and Lamia's voice projects the frustration and loneliness underlying the later years of the once vibrant couple. Whether they blame Scott or Zelda for the Fitzgeralds' mutual disintegration, listeners will be fascinated by this well-researched story of the beautiful flapper and her famous husband during the Roaring Twenties. 

Reviewed by Candace Levy for AudioFile on May 9, 2013

Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler and Jenna Lamia

• Publication Date: March 26, 2013
• Genres: Fiction , Historical Fiction , Women's Fiction
• Publisher: Macmillan Audio
• ISBN-10: 1427230145
• ISBN-13: 9781427230140

Life In The Making

Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald – Book Review

Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler Published by: St. Martin’s Press Publish Date: 2013 Produced by: Macmillan Audio Genre(s): Fiction, Historical Fiction, Historical HB&W Rating: 5 View on Goodreads Buy on Amazon : Barnes & Noble, Book Depository

“No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.”

A dazzling novel that captures all of the romance, glamour, and tragedy of the first flapper, Zelda Fitzgerald. 

When beautiful, reckless Southern belle Zelda Sayre meets F. Scott Fitzgerald at a country club dance in 1918, she is seventeen years old and he is a young army lieutenant stationed in Alabama. Before long, the “ungettable” Zelda has fallen for him despite his unsuitability: Scott isn’t wealthy or prominent or even a Southerner, and keeps insisting, absurdly, that his writing will bring him both fortune and fame. 

Her father is deeply unimpressed. But after Scott sells his first novel, This Side of Paradise, to Scribner’s, Zelda optimistically boards a train north, to marry him in the vestry of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and take the rest as it comes.

Synopsis source: Goodreads

‘Gone?’ I would whisper, to no-one in particular. I, too, waited for me to be overwhelmed – but all that happened was what happens to anyone who has lost their one love: my heart cleaved into two parts, before and foreverafterward.

I felt so many things with this book. While Fowler’s more recent book, A Good Neighborhood , is completely different than this, her first book, both show her skill for stripping her characters down and laying bare all the things that makes them human, warts and all.

We glared at each other then, with the kind of hatred that comes from being deliberately wounded in one’s softest, most vulnerable places by a person who used to love you passionately.

Fowler does an excellent job at creating another narrative for “the first flapper” than the prejudiced views Hemingway and his contemporaries had born that have largely passed as truth since. Z is an in-depth look at what it was like for an intelligent, charming, and ambitious woman, a woman ahead of her time, to exist in a world where privileged (read: wealthy and influential) husbands could conveniently pay a doctor to have her declared mentally unstable and locked up in a sanitarium for “re-education” because she dared to think her ambitions equal to his, because of her failure to create a “happy hearth.”

Single women could work all they wanted; married women locked themselves into a gilded cage. All of that had seemed natural before. Now, it made me angry. Now, I saw how a woman might sometimes want to steer her own course rather than trail her husband like a favored dog.

This book highlights the disparity between the sexes in a world that has always favored men. Men who, like Scott, love their wives deeply and are forward thinkers, are still subject to the culture in which they are raised and honestly can’t see the difference between fostering a woman’s ambitions the same way one would foster a man’s. And unfortunately, men like Hemingway, who think it’s their prerogative to treat women as objects, as toys that exist for their benefit only, with no regard for their thoughts or feelings whatsoever.

It also briefly examines mental illness, given that Zelda was institutionalized multiple times. It is a disturbing look into the common practices of the time and the typical thought behind those practices. Read so closely after The Lost Child , which goes into much more detail on the topic, this was especially abhorrent to me.

For us, stars aligned, the gods smiled–prob’ly there was a tidal wave someplace, too, and we just haven’t heard about it yet.

This book was a poignant look into the tumultuous relationship of The Jazz Age’s golden couple, told from a perspective that has gone largely untold. Well-researched and thoughtfully drawn out, I was left feeling like I had met these historical figures in the flesh. If you have the time and opportunity, I highly recommend this book.

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Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

by Therese Anne Fowler

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Book review: ‘Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald,’ by Therese Anne Fowler

By dallasnews Administrator

1:06 PM on Apr 6, 2013 CDT

Celebrities today have nothing on Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The couple's outrageous behavior, talent and golden good looks set a high standard. Therese Anne Fowler's new historical novel Z , told from Zelda's perspective, re-creates the story of their lives together.

It's a timely book, coming right before the summer release of a new 3-D movie version of The Great Gatsby . Fowler has read Nancy Milford's fine biography, Zelda , and other books about and by the famous flapper, as well as letters the couple exchanged. The result of Fowler's reimagining is a fascinating novel that makes Zelda into a full-blown fictional character with feelings and dreams — not just nightmares.

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What was it like to be Zelda? In the beginning, not bad. She grew up in Montgomery, Ala., where her family was prominent. She had friends, her ballet lessons and plenty of suitors. All she really wanted was more freedom.

Zelda Sayre was about to turn 18 when she first met F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1918, in wartime, and fell in love. He was four years older and a Yankee, from St. Paul, Minn., educated at Princeton. Scott was stationed at a camp near Montgomery, waiting to go to war. He was an author, and confident like no one she had ever met.

The novel starts slowly, as Fowler sets up Zelda’s frustration with Southern society’s expectations for her. “There were so many rules we girls were supposed to adhere to, so much emphasis on propriety,” she confides. “Straight backs. Gloved hands. Unpainted (and unkissed) lips. Pressed skirts, modest words, downturned eyes, chaste thoughts. A lot of nonsense, in my view.”

When she marries Scott, she breaks free from all that. Phenomenal success comes with his first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920). He makes a lot of money for a while, and they live wildly and well, in New York, Long Island, Hollywood, Paris and the French Riviera.

But Zelda has no sense of what their finances are, and almost no control over her life. As a writer of fiction, Scott is dependent on selling stories to magazines or movies, or finishing another novel. But it is hard to write when you drink as much as he does.

He believes that immortality can only be achieved before turning 30. “I’m 27 years old,” he tells Zelda. “Time is running out.”

Fowler gives a convincing picture of the young couple’s financial insecurities, only further complicated by the birth of their little girl, Scottie, and by Zelda’s health problems and bouts with mental instability and Scott’s alcoholism.

While living on the French Riviera and in Paris, they get to know Pablo Picasso, Sara and Gerald Murphy, the Hemingways and Gertrude Stein — as well as other legendary figures from the Lost Generation.

A strong thread running through Z is Zelda's ambition for herself, at the same time she is ambitious for her husband. She takes up ballet again, as well as writing and painting. Fowler shows her to be serious about these pursuits and to exhibit real promise. Scott seems to encourage her, but puts his own name on some of her writing, to bring in more money. When Zelda has an opportunity to dance a lead part with a respected ballet company, Scott refuses to let her do it.

Throughout Z , there is a debate over whether Scott holds Zelda back or she holds him back, though it's clear who ends up the bigger star.

More than once, Hemingway warns Scott that Zelda is a liability, and she comes to hate Hemingway for alienating her husband’s affections. But it’s obviously more complicated than that.

Z tells a sad story. Like so many celebrity tales, much of it is true. If you've never given much thought to Zelda, this lively novel is a way to see her side of things.

Anne Morris, a member of the National Book Critics Circle, lives in Austin.

[email protected]

A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

Therese Anne Fowler

(St. Martin’s, $25.99)

dallasnews Administrator

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Book Review: Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler

By Nicole Bartley

The Golden Couple of the Roaring ’20s was actually tarnished pyrite. This is revealed in Therese Anne Fowler’s recent novel, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald. Its overall message seems to be that reputations lie; it shatters any incomplete preconceptions of Zelda and Scott, leaving readers wondering what is fact and what is rumor. As Fowler writes from Zelda’s perspective,

“I was a Sayer, after all; a woman, yes, but still a Sayer; my life was intended to mean something beyond daughter-wife-mother. Wasn’t it?

“Oh, just let it go, a different voice urged me. What difference could your puny achievements possibly make?

“All the difference, the other voice answered.

“Which of my many possible lives did I want to define me? Which one could I have?

“And the question that troubled me most: Was it even really up to me?” (308)

Before readers delve into the story, they may skip to the last pages—not to learn how and when it ends in Zelda’s life, but how much of the novel is fact or fiction. Fowler’s repeated disclaimers that Z is a work of fiction based off an investigation of contracting facts, beliefs, and gossip is reassuring. The question, “Did this really happen?” may still exist in readers’ minds, but they can be assuaged by Fowler’s attempts to be as faithful to Zelda’s reality as possible.

The novel follows Zelda Sayer’s life after she meets F. Scott Fitzgerald, and finishes soon after Scott dies. Readers are easily swept up in the glitzy and glamorous era of New York and Paris in the 1920s, and the soothing beauty of the timeless Mediterranean. The couple flits between parties, hangovers, and writing sprees in a whirlwind of activity and promises. However, Fowler does not dwell on Scott and Zelda’s moments of destitution. Readers are never sure how Scott and Zelda are able to survive—where they get their money when he’s not writing, how much they have to borrow, or whose kindness they request; they just seem to get by. And according to Fowler, even Zelda was in the dark about financial circumstances.

Plot holes aside, the novel uses solid descriptions and voices. Readers could easily envision Zelda’s hometown, the glittering parties, and the sweeping landscapes of New York and southern France. And in the beginning, Zelda’s enthusiastic southern belle mentality radiates from her narration and dialogue. But as the story progresses, the structural twang in her narration slowly disappears. Perhaps as the story progresses, she is assimilating northern American and French cultures and leaving the South behind.

Largely, Zelda’s growth is due to Scott, and her transition from maiden into worldly woman is gradual and believable. Readers witness Zelda’s growth through her own eyes, as well as Scott’s dismaying spiral into paranoia and alcoholism. There is something voyeuristic about living a renowned writer’s life through his wife’s eyes. Through Zelda, Fowler reveals more of an unbiased representation of the writing life than if she had undertaken the task from Scott’s perspective. So many writers are neurotic, self-deprecating, and overly critical about their work, and it seems F. Scott Fitzgerald was no different. This novel is as much about him as it is Zelda, and writing about him from a woman’s perspective might have been easier for Fowler. The double layer of writers’ mentalities might have driven Fowler mad, but Zelda’s madness was a challenging and welcome plaything.

For most of the book, Zelda’s famed craziness is nonexistent. Her physical and medical problems coupled with marital strains make her behavior erratic, but insanity seems to be nothing but a vengeful rumor… until part four. Fowler’s Zelda is a misunderstood and captured woman struggling with her own independence during a riveting but stifling age when a woman’s role was wife, mother, and homemaker. Scott’s insecurities and unstable senses of responsibility drive her first to infidelity and—after his desperate attempts to make her adhere to a woman’s “proper” role—a physical and mental breaking point. In the story, the doctors call schizophrenia a “divided mind,” which is what Zelda is pushed toward: a divide between who she is and who Scott tries to make her be. (Doctors have since reevaluated her condition and diagnosed her as bi-polar.) Fowler writes,

“I was fighting for my right to exist independently in the world, to realize myself, to steer my own boat if I felt like it. He wanted to control everything, to have it all turn out the way he’d once envisioned it would, the way he’d seen it when he’d first gone off to New York City and was going to find good work and send for me. He wanted his adoring flapper, his Jazz Age muse. He wanted to recapture the past that had never existed in the first place. He’d spent his life building what he’d seen as an impressive tower of stone and brick, and woken up to find it was only a little house of cards, sent tumbling now by the wind.” (346)

But Fowler does more than explore the causes of Zelda’s insanity. She presents Zelda’s story and fragile state so realistically that readers will easily sympathize with her shifting emotions and rationality. This is one of Fowler’s main accomplishments: She made madness become rational. Another accomplishment: She reveals a person underneath the mask of legend.

Filed under: Book Review , Nicole Bartley , Prose

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Book review: ‘z: a novel of zelda fitzgerald’.

Z: A NOVEL OF ZELDA FITZGERALD By Therese Anne Fowler St. Martin’s Press, $25.99, 384 pages

The Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald story is well-known. As writer Budd Schulberg observed, its romantic legend is so uniquely American in all its strengths and weaknesses that it is little wonder that the life and work became mythologized. But there is something worrisome about the exploitation of the Fitzgerald mystique, which includes director Baz Luhrmann’s infantile film rendition of “The Great Gatsby” and a trio of less-than-mediocre novels: “Call Me Zelda” by Erika Robuck, “Beautiful Fools: The Last Affair of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald” by R. Clifton Spargo and “Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald” by Therese Anne Fowler.

Call it Fitzgerald Lite. This thin gruel seems tailor-made for an 18- to 34-year-old demographic, for a public accustomed to a steady diet of random ephemera, collected in flashing bytes through a vast network of email, mobile apps and social media. When you are accustomed to graze on tweets, to view the past by simply clicking on photos and videos posted online and think in terms of 140-character chunks, there is no opportunity, let alone curiosity, to consider various points of view, context or depth. It would seem the purveyors of film and fiction are following such a road map when pulling together their stereotypical creations.

Consider “Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald.” In this rewriting of history, the author stresses the emotional journey of her characters, but what are we left with?

Ms. Fowler’s fictional Zelda clunks through a series of shopping sprees and endless parties in New York City, Hollywood, Paris and the French Riviera, a forgettable lump that easily could be played by Reese Witherspoon. Missing is Zelda’s grace, defiant courage, devastating wit, any hint of “the gleam of derision that flickered beneath the black edge of her eyelashes,” as her friend, writer Sara Haardt, observed. Missing, too, is any deep sense of the beauty and tragedy of the South, ingrained into the DNA of a certain generation — a mixture of gaiety and sadness that ran, like a steady current, beneath the surface. There is a faint inkling of Zelda’s talent and reckless capers, but none of the desperate yearning for attention that drove them. When Zelda suffers from nervous breakdowns at the end of the novel, her situation is not even poignant; it is a yawn.

That F. Scott Fitzgerald was an embarrassing, nasty alcoholic is well-known. That he filched lines and scenarios from the writings of his gifted wife (and some friends), passing them off as his own, has been brilliantly explored in Nancy Milford’s 1970 biography “Zelda” and more recently in Sally Cline’s “Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise.” That he was, in H.L. Mencken’s words, “so handsome that he might even have been called beautiful” is ruthlessly exploited by Ms. Fowler, who culminates her tale in a tawdry scenario where, detectivelike, she explains the sudden animosity between Zelda and Scott’s best pal, homophobic Ernest Hemingway.

Missing from this novel are any of the virtues that tipped the scale in Fitzgerald’s favor: his professional generosity, friendliness and enormous talent — which, despite all his flaws, made him so well-liked, admired and loved. Instead, he flits in and out of the pages, a bad-tempered, shallow twit, relentlessly scribbling scraps of conversations into a tiny notebook.

As for childhood friend Sara Haardt, she was never the hardened feminist that Ms. Fowler makes her out to be, nor was she ever particularly close to Zelda. Ms. Fowler’s Mencken lacks any of the supercharged energy that made him personally so magnetic or attracted so many disciples; here, he is portrayed as a dour crank. Hemingway is bellicose, oversexed and a stereotypical jerk. Sara and Gerald Murphy, Gertrude Stein and George Jean Nathan appear and disappear, like images on Flickr.

But this is fiction, you say. Yes, and so did the author, in a well-written afterword. Even so, one has the impression that this is a novel written by someone who has inhaled vast quantities of biographical information, too much, too fast, without any real understanding of the many dimensions that formed the times or the characters involved.

This is true of the entire pantheon of the bland, homogenized products on display. One worries that its consumers, not used to a steady nutrition of solid, original sources, without any notion of what goes into the contemplation of a variety of perspectives and points of view, will confuse fiction and fact. Unless, of course, they are driven back to the real thing. We can only hope.

Marion Elizabeth Rodgers is the author of various books, among them “Mencken & Sara: A Life in Letters” (Anchor, 1992).

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Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald Paperback – April 14, 2020

THE INSPIRATION FOR THE TELEVISION DRAMA Z: THE BEGINNING OF EVERYTHING I wish I could tell everyone who thinks we're ruined, Look closer…and you'll see something extraordinary, mystifying, something real and true. We have never been what we seemed. When beautiful, reckless Southern belle Zelda Sayre meets F. Scott Fitzgerald at a country club dance in 1918, she is seventeen years old and he is a young army lieutenant stationed in Alabama. Before long, the "ungettable" Zelda has fallen for him despite his unsuitability: Scott isn't wealthy or prominent or even a Southerner, and keeps insisting, absurdly, that his writing will bring him both fortune and fame. Her father is deeply unimpressed. But after Scott sells his first novel, This Side of Paradise, to Scribner's, Zelda optimistically boards a train north, to marry him in the vestry of St. Patrick's Cathedral and take the rest as it comes. What comes, here at the dawn of the Jazz Age, is unimagined attention and success and celebrity that will make Scott and Zelda legends in their own time. Everyone wants to meet the dashing young author of the scandalous novel―and his witty, perhaps even more scandalous wife. Zelda bobs her hair, adopts daring new fashions, and revels in this wild new world. Each place they go becomes a playground: New York City, Long Island, Hollywood, Paris, and the French Riviera―where they join the endless party of the glamorous, sometimes doomed Lost Generation that includes Ernest Hemingway, Sara and Gerald Murphy, and Gertrude Stein. Everything seems new and possible. Troubles, at first, seem to fade like morning mist. But not even Jay Gatsby's parties go on forever. Who is Zelda, other than the wife of a famous―sometimes infamous―husband? How can she forge her own identity while fighting her demons and Scott's, too? With brilliant insight and imagination, Therese Anne Fowler's New York Times bestseller brings us Zelda's irresistible story as she herself might have told it.

• Print length 384 pages
• Language English
• Publisher St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date April 14, 2020
• Dimensions 5.37 x 1.09 x 8.28 inches
• ISBN-10 1250773202
• ISBN-13 978-1250773203
• See all details

Editorial Reviews

About the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ St. Martin's Griffin (April 14, 2020)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 384 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1250773202
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1250773203
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.38 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.37 x 1.09 x 8.28 inches
• #2,182 in Southern Fiction
• #3,996 in Biographical Historical Fiction
• #6,759 in Biographical Fiction (Books)

About the author

Therese anne fowler.

Therese Anne Fowler is the NYT and USA Today bestselling author of It All Comes Down to this, as well as Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald (adapted for television as Z: The Beginning of Everything starring Christina Ricci), A Well-Behaved Woman, and A Good Neighborhood. She is married to author John Kessel.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald

(1896-1940)

Who Was F. Scott Fitzgerald?

F. Scott Fitzgerald was a short story writer and novelist considered one of the pre-eminent authors in the history of American literature due almost entirely to the enormous posthumous success of his third book, The Great Gatsby . Perhaps the quintessential American novel, as well as a definitive social history of the Jazz Age, The Great Gatsby has become required reading for virtually every American high school student and has had a transportive effect on generation after generation of readers.

At the age of 24, the success of his first novel, This Side of Paradise , made Fitzgerald famous. One week later, he married the woman he loved and his muse, Zelda Sayre. However by the end of the 1920s Fitzgerald descended into drinking, and Zelda had a mental breakdown. Following the unsuccessful Tender Is the Night , Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood and became a scriptwriter. He died of a heart attack in 1940, at age 44, his final novel only half completed.

Family, Education and Early Life

Fitzgerald's mother, Mary McQuillan, was from an Irish-Catholic family that made a small fortune in Minnesota as wholesale grocers. His father, Edward Fitzgerald, had opened a wicker furniture business in St. Paul, and, when it failed, took a job as a salesman for Procter & Gamble. During the first decade of Fitzgerald's life, his father’s job took the family back and forth between Buffalo and Syracuse in upstate New York. When Fitzgerald was 12, Edward lost his job with Procter & Gamble, and the family moved back to St. Paul in 1908 to live off of his mother's inheritance.

Fitzgerald was a bright, handsome and ambitious boy, the pride and joy of his parents and especially his mother. He attended the St. Paul Academy. When he was 13, he saw his first piece of writing appear in print: a detective story published in the school newspaper. In 1911, when Fitzgerald was 15 years old, his parents sent him to the Newman School, a prestigious Catholic preparatory school in New Jersey. There, he met Father Sigourney Fay, who noticed his incipient talent with the written word and encouraged him to pursue his literary ambitions.

After graduating from the Newman School in 1913, Fitzgerald decided to stay in New Jersey to continue his artistic development at Princeton University. At Princeton, he firmly dedicated himself to honing his craft as a writer, writing scripts for Princeton's famous Triangle Club musicals as well as frequent articles for the Princeton Tiger humor magazine and stories for the Nassau Literary Magazine.

However, Fitzgerald's writing came at the expense of his coursework. He was placed on academic probation, and, in 1917, he dropped out of school to join the U.S. Army. Afraid that he might die in World War I with his literary dreams unfulfilled, in the weeks before reporting to duty, Fitzgerald hastily wrote a novel called The Romantic Egotist . Though the publisher, Charles Scribner's Sons, rejected the novel, the reviewer noted its originality and encouraged Fitzgerald to submit more work in the future.

Fitzgerald was commissioned a second lieutenant in the infantry and assigned to Camp Sheridan outside of Montgomery, Alabama. The war ended in November 1918, before Fitzgerald was ever deployed. Upon his discharge, he moved to New York City hoping to launch a career in advertising lucrative enough to convince his girlfriend, Zelda, to marry him. He quit his job after only a few months, however, and returned to St. Paul to rewrite his novel.

'This Side of Paradise' (1920)

This Side of Paradise is a largely autobiographical story about love and greed. The story was centered on Amory Blaine, an ambitious Midwesterner who falls in love with, but is ultimately rejected by, two girls from high-class families.

The novel was published in 1920 to glowing reviews. Almost overnight, it turned Fitzgerald, at the age of 24, into one of the country's most promising young writers. He eagerly embraced his newly minted celebrity status and embarked on an extravagant lifestyle that earned him a reputation as a playboy and hindered his reputation as a serious literary writer.

'The Beautiful and Damned' (1922)

In 1922, Fitzgerald published his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned , the story of the troubled marriage of Anthony and Gloria Patch. The Beautiful and Damned helped to cement Fitzgerald’s status as one of the great chroniclers and satirists of the culture of wealth, extravagance and ambition that emerged during the affluent 1920s — what became known as the Jazz Age. "It was an age of miracles," Fitzgerald wrote, "it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire."

'The Great Gatsby' (1925)

The Great Gatsby is considered Fitzgerald's finest work, with its beautiful lyricism, pitch-perfect portrayal of the Jazz Age, and searching critiques of materialism, love and the American Dream. Seeking a change of scenery to spark his creativity, in 1924 Fitzgerald had moved to Valescure, France, to write. Published in 1925, The Great Gatsby is narrated by Nick Carraway, a Midwesterner who moves into the town of West Egg on Long Island, next door to a mansion owned by the wealthy and mysterious Jay Gatsby. The novel follows Nick and Gatsby's strange friendship and Gatsby's pursuit of a married woman named Daisy, ultimately leading to his exposure as a bootlegger and his death.

Although The Great Gatsby was well-received when it was published, it was not until the 1950s and '60s, long after Fitzgerald's death, that it achieved its stature as the definitive portrait of the "Roaring Twenties," as well as one of the greatest American novels ever written.

'Tender Is the Night' (1934)

In 1934, after years of toil, Fitzgerald finally published his fourth novel, Tender is the Night , about an American psychiatrist in Paris, France, and his troubled marriage to a wealthy patient. The book was inspired by his wife Zelda’s struggle with mental illness. Although Tender is the Night was a commercial failure and was initially poorly received due to its chronologically jumbled structure, it has since gained in reputation and is now considered among the great American novels.

'The Love of the Last Tycoon' (unfinished)

Fitzgerald began work on his last novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon , in 1939. He had completed over half the manuscript when he died in 1940.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Short Stories

Beginning in 1920 and continuing throughout the rest of his career, Fitzgerald supported himself financially by writing great numbers of short stories for popular publications such as The Saturday Evening Post and Esquire . Some of his most notable stories include "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," "The Camel's Back" and "The Last of the Belles."

Fitzgerald’s Wife Zelda

F. Scott Fitzgerald married Zelda Sayre on April 3, 1920, in New York City. Zelda was Fitzgerald’s muse, and her likeness is prominently featured in his works including This Side of Paradise , The Beautiful and the Damned , The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night . Fitzgerald met 18-year-old Zelda, the daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge, during his time in the infantry. One week after the publication of Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise , the couple married. They had one child, a daughter named Frances “Scottie” Fitzgerald, born in 1921.

Beginning in the late 1920s, Zelda suffered from mental health issues, and the couple moved back and forth between Delaware and France. In 1930, Zelda suffered a breakdown. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia and treated at the Sheppard Pratt Hospital in Towson, Maryland. That same year was admitted to a mental health clinic in Switzerland. Two years later she was treated at the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. She spent the remaining years before her death in 1948 in and out of various mental health clinics.

Later Years

After completing his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby , Fitzgerald's life began to unravel. Always a heavy drinker, he progressed steadily into alcoholism and suffered prolonged bouts of writer's block. After two years lost to alcohol and depression, in 1937 Fitzgerald attempted to revive his career as a screenwriter and freelance storywriter in Hollywood, and he achieved modest financial, if not critical, success for his efforts before his death in 1940.

Fitzgerald died of a heart attack on December 21, 1940, at the age of 44, in Hollywood, California. Fitzgerald died believing himself a failure, since none of his works received more than modest commercial or critical success during his lifetime.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Birth Year: 1896
• Birth date: September 24, 1896
• Birth State: Minnesota
• Birth City: St. Paul
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: American short-story writer and novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald is known for his turbulent personal life and his famous novel 'The Great Gatsby.'
• World War I
• Fiction and Poetry
• Astrological Sign: Libra
• St. Paul Academy
• Newman School
• Princeton University
• Interesting Facts
• Fitzgerald’s namesake (and second cousin three times removed on his father's side) was Francis Scott Key, who wrote the lyrics to the "Star-Spangled Banner."
• Fitzgerald died believing himself a failure, since none of his works received more than modest commercial or critical success during his lifetime.
• Although 'The Great Gatsby' was well-received when it was published, it was long after Fitzgerald's death that it was regarded as one of the greatest American novels ever written.
• Death Year: 1940
• Death date: December 21, 1940
• Death State: California
• Death City: Hollywood
• Death Country: United States

We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: F. Scott Fitzgerald Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/f-scott-fitzgerald
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: July 9, 2020
• Original Published Date: April 3, 2014
• What little I've accomplished has been by the most laborious and uphill work, and I wish now I'd never relaxed or looked back—but said at the end of The Great Gatsby: 'I've found my line—from now on this comes first.'
• Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.
• In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.
• It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess and it was an age of satire.
• Having once found the intensity of art, nothing else that can happen in life can ever again seem as important as the creative process.
• My characters are all Scott Fitzgerald.
• I didn't know till 15 that there was anyone in the world except me, and it cost me plenty.
• I never at any one time saw [Gatsby] clear myself—for he started as one man I knew and then changed into myself—the amalgam was never complete in my mind.
• Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy.
• There are no second acts in American lives.
• Riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.
• I left my capacity for hoping on the little roads that led to Zelda's sanitarium.
• Isn't Hollywood a dump—in the human sense of the word. A hideous town ... full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement.
• I was in love with a whirlwind and I must spin a net big enough to catch it.

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