Zelda Fitzgerald Biography Quotes 7 Report mistakes

Early Life
Zelda Sayre was born in 1900 in Montgomery, Alabama, the youngest child of a prominent Southern family. Her father, Anthony Dickinson Sayre, served as a justice on the Alabama Supreme Court, and her mother, Minnie Machen Sayre, encouraged creativity at home. From an early age Zelda was spirited, athletic, and drawn to performance and attention. She excelled in dance and embraced the rituals of local society, yet chafed at the expectations placed on well-bred young women in the Deep South. The combination of discipline in her household and her own rebellious energy produced a personality that would fascinate and unsettle people throughout her life.

Meeting F. Scott Fitzgerald
During World War I, Zelda met F. Scott Fitzgerald, a young army officer stationed near Montgomery. Their courtship was intense and uneven: she doubted he could support the life she wanted, and he was determined to prove himself as a writer. When his first novel was accepted for publication in 1920, she agreed to marry him, and they wed in New York City that year. Their union quickly became a public spectacle, made all the more visible by Scott's sudden celebrity. The couple's only child, Frances "Scottie" Fitzgerald, was born in 1921, anchoring a family that would nonetheless move constantly in search of work, inspiration, and escape.

Jazz Age Celebrity and Marriage
In the early 1920s the Fitzgeralds came to symbolize the new era. Zelda's style, wit, and audacity made her an emblem of the flapper, and journalists sought her quips as much as her husband's. They lived in New York, St. Paul, and on Long Island, and spent long stretches in Paris and on the French Riviera among American expatriates. Friends and contemporaries included Gerald and Sara Murphy, who hosted artists and writers on the Côte d'Azur, as well as Ring Lardner and Edmund Wilson. Ernest Hemingway, a frequent presence in their circle, had a famously antagonistic relationship with Zelda; he judged her a distraction for Scott, while she found him domineering. The tensions and excesses of this milieu fueled Scott's fiction and shaped Zelda's complicated public image.

Artistic Ambitions: Dance, Fiction, and Painting
Zelda's own creative drive never dimmed. She threw herself into ballet with relentless discipline in her twenties, practicing for hours every day in the hope of performing professionally. The physical strain and the pressure she placed on herself became part of a larger pattern of exhaustion and anxiety. She also wrote essays and short fiction, sometimes published under Scott's name or jointly to secure better fees. Her voice, keenly observant, often lyrical, and sometimes caustic, appeared in pieces that explored modern femininity and the costs of pleasure. In 1932 she published her novel Save Me the Waltz, largely autobiographical and drawn from the same shared marital material that Scott would rework in Tender Is the Night. The book's path to publication was fraught: Maxwell Perkins, Scott's editor, and Scott himself pressed for cuts and changes, and Zelda was forced to cede ground on matters of structure and emphasis. She also painted tirelessly, producing portraits and fantastical scenes, and later mounted a solo exhibition in New York, where reactions ranged from curiosity to condescension.

Illness, Strain, and Separation
By the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Fitzgeralds' marriage was strained by financial instability, Scott's alcoholism, and Zelda's deteriorating health. She suffered a severe breakdown in Europe and was treated for mental illness at clinics abroad and in the United States. The diagnosis commonly given at the time was schizophrenia; later readers and clinicians have debated the label, but there is no dispute that she endured recurring episodes that required extended hospitalizations. In Baltimore and elsewhere she pursued therapy while trying to write and paint, and she kept up an extraordinary correspondence with Scott and with friends. The couple's quarrels over authorship, whose life was being used, who had the right to tell their story, grew sharper as Scott revised Tender Is the Night, often drawing directly on their conflicts and on Zelda's medical records. Their daughter Scottie remained a vital link between them, and both parents attempted, with uneven success, to shield her from the worst of their troubles.

Last Years and Death
In the late 1930s Scott left for Hollywood to work as a screenwriter, while Zelda, in and out of hospitals, returned periodically to the Southeast. They were often apart but never fully severed; they exchanged letters filled with affection, recrimination, and literary advice. After Scott's death in 1940, Zelda continued to write and to paint, working on an unfinished novel and revisiting earlier themes of love, ambition, and confinement. She spent her final period of treatment at Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. In 1948 a fire swept through the building, and Zelda was among the patients who died. She was 47.

Legacy
Zelda Fitzgerald's reputation long trailed her husband's, but her own work and example have increasingly attracted attention. As a writer, she left a novel, essays, stories, diaries, and letters that reveal a distinctive intelligence and an original sense of form. As a painter and dancer, she embodied the modernist urge to test boundaries, sometimes at great personal cost. Figures such as Ernest Hemingway, Gerald and Sara Murphy, Maxwell Perkins, Ring Lardner, and Edmund Wilson witnessed, and sometimes shaped, the narrative that cast her alternately as muse, cautionary tale, and emblem of a roaring decade. Today she is seen more fully: a Southern daughter who became a defining face of the Jazz Age; a creator who fought to claim her material; a woman whose struggles with illness unfolded under public scrutiny; and a writer whose voice, once overshadowed, speaks for itself in pages that still surprise with their candor and fire.

Our collection contains 7 quotes who is written by Zelda, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Wisdom - Love - Free Will & Fate - Romantic.

Other people realated to Zelda: Christina Ricci (Actress)

• 1991 Collected Writings (Essays)
• 1960 Bits of Paradise (Short Stories)
• 1933 Scandalabra (Play)
• 1932 Save Me the Waltz (Novel)

• Wikipedia