Zelda Fitzgerald
The Tragic, Meticulously Researched Biography of the Jazz Age's High Priestess
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4.2 • 5 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Zelda Fitzgerald was the mythical American Dream Girl of the Roaring Twenties who became, in the words of her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, “the first American flapper.” Their romance transformed a symbol of glamour and spectacle of the Jazz Age. When Zelda cracked up, not long after the stock market crash of 1929, Scott remained loyal to her through a nightmare of later breakdowns and final madness.
Sally Cline brings us a trenchantly authentic voice through Zelda’s own highly autobiographical writings and hundreds of letters she wrote to friends and family, publishers and others. New medical evidence and interviews with Zelda’s last psychiatrist suggest that her “insanity” may have been less a specific clinical condition than the product of the treatment she endured for schizophrenia and her husband’s devastating alcoholism. In narrating Zelda’s tumultuous life, Cline vividly evokes the circle of Jazz Age friends that included Edmund Wilson, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, and H. L. Mencken. Her exhaustive research and incisive analysis animate a profoundly
moving portrait of Zelda and provide a convincing context to the legacy of her tragedy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
More than half a century after her death in a sanatorium fire in North Carolina, Zelda Fitzgerald (1900 1948) remains a controversial figure. Was she the Golden Girl and Jazz Age icon, the mad Southern belle who drove her husband to drink and destroyed his genius, or the doomed victim of Fitzgerald's ego? She was some of these and none, according to Cline's exhaustively researched biography. Cline was permitted for the first time to draw upon Zelda's medical records to document the range of treatments her physicians subjected her to in an effort to conform her to appropriately feminine behavior. Previous biographers have come down heavily in favor of one or the other of the doomed Fitzgerald pair. Cline, a Cambridge scholar and biographer of Radclyffe Hall, appears to agree with the psychiatrist who viewed the relationship as a folie deux, in which Scott viewed Zelda's desperate attempts to find an identity through writing, dance and painting as frontal attacks on his masculinity and genius, and Zelda, for her part, clung to an exhausting emotional dependence on Scott, never quite breaking free. If there is a villain here, it is Ernest Hemingway, who first launched the notion of Zelda's madness and remained her implacable enemy. Cline claims that Zelda was more successful as a writer, dancer and painter than is commonly supposed, though her argument would have been strengthened had more of Zelda's paintings been reproduced. 16 pages of b&w photos. 35,000 first printing.
