Zelda Fitzgerald

Who was Zelda Fitzgerald?

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, born Zelda Sayre in Montgomery, Alabama, was an American novelist and the wife of writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. She was an icon of the 1920s—dubbed by her husband "the first American Flapper." After the success of his first novel, This Side of Paradise, the Fitzgeralds became celebrities.

From early adolescence Zelda was a formidable presence in Southern society, outshining all other belles as the star in ballet recitals and elite country club events. Shortly after finishing high school, she met F. Scott Fitzgerald at a country club dance, but was unimpressed and agreed with her family on his limited financial prospects to provide for a family. With his professed infatuation, a light flirtation evolved into a lengthy long distance courtship of weekly letters, with Fitzgerald aware of her uncommitted dating of other men. Determined to obtain financial security, and thus Zelda, Fitzgerald increased his writing from articles to his first book. On March 20, 1920, Scribner's Sons agreed to publish his novel "This Side of Paradise" and Fitzgerald immediately cabled Zelda, who agreed to travel to New York to marry and live with him. The couple wed in New York on April 3, 1920, and later moved to Europe. While Scott received acclaim for The Great Gatsby and his short stories, and the couple socialized with literary luminaries like Ernest Hemingway, their marriage was a tangle of jealousy, resentment and acrimony. Scott used their relationship as material in his novels, even lifting snippets from Zelda's diary and assigning them to his fictional heroines. Seeking an artistic identity of her own, Zelda wrote magazine articles and short stories, and at 27 became obsessed with a career as a ballerina, practicing to exhaustion.