Zelda Fitzgerald (1900–48,) née Zelda Sayre, was an American writer, artist, and dancer. She is best known for her turbulent marriage to the Jazz Age novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald and for inspiring the attractive and rebellious Southern belle that regularly appears in his stories.
Born in Montgomery, Alabama, Zelda met F. Scott Fitzgerald at a military dance when he was posted in Montgomery. He famously told her that she looked like the female lead in a novel he was writing. Zelda’s turbulent life and marriage are reflected in Scott’s Tender Is the Night (1934.) Her version of their life together is the novel Save Me the Waltz (1932.)
Infamous for her social exploits, Zelda personified the carefree ideals of the 1920s “flapper”—the 1920s woman who wore short skirts, bobbed hair, and listened to jazz. She was the muse for her husband’s famous female characters, including Nicole Diver in Tender Is the Night, which was set in the hedonistic society of the “Roaring Twenties.”
A psychological breakdown led to a series of hospitalizations in 1930. Zelda was diagnosed with schizophrenia and ended up at the Highland Mental Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. She died in a hospital fire while waiting for electric shock therapy.
Notable biographies include Nancy Mitford’s Zelda: A Life (1970) and Sally Cline’s Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (2002.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Zelda Fitzgerald
Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.
—Zelda Fitzgerald
Topics: Heart, Love, Romance
Oh, the secret life of man and woman—dreaming how much better we would be than we are if we were somebody else or even ourselves, and feeling that our estate has been unexploited to its fullest.
—Zelda Fitzgerald
Topics: Wishes
By the time a person has achieved years adequate for choosing a direction, the die is cast and the moment has long since passed which determined the future.
—Zelda Fitzgerald
Topics: Choices, Maturity
Most people hew the battlements of life from compromise, erecting their impregnable keeps from judicious submissions, fabricating their philosophical drawbacks from emotional retractions and scalding marauders in the boiling oil of sour grapes.
—Zelda Fitzgerald
Topics: Compromise
I don’t want to live. I want to love first, and live incidentally.
—Zelda Fitzgerald
Topics: Living, Love, Purpose, Meaning
We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising. I still believe that one can learn to play the piano by mail and that mud will give you a perfect complexion.
—Zelda Fitzgerald
Topics: Advertising
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