Zelda Fitzgerald

A literary critic/historian has suggested that Zelda Fitzgerald was a better writer than her husband F. Scott Fitzgerald, and that the reason she spent so much time in mental institutions was because she was female and a threat to Scott's fame and fortune. Let's hope not. Zelda did possess an enormous talent - professional writing, dancing and painting. But, she was a diagnosed schizophrenic and having what they called in the thirties the "Nervous Disease." R.D. Laing in the Divided Self wrote, "No one has schizophrenia, like having a cold. He (she) is schizophrenic." Scott Fitzgerald: "that girl had everything . . . She was the belle of Montgomery, the daughter of the Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court...Everybody in Alabama and Georgia knew about her, everybody that counted. She had beauty, talent, family, she could do anything she wanted to, and she's thrown it all away. And you know, she's cuckoo, she's crazy as a loon. I'm madly in love with her." As infamous icons of the Jazz/Flapper Age, Prohibition and American Ex-patriotism in France, Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald lived a "high on the hog" lifestyle of endless parties, exhibitionism, drunkenness, and conflict. Scott was an alcoholic, charming and civil when sober, a complete jerk when intoxicated. She was married at age twenty, dead at age 48, a victim of a hospital fire. Scott died in 1940 at age 44 of a heart attack. Time magazine, "there was a time when Mrs. Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was a more fabulous character than her novel writing husband. That was when she was Zelda Sayre.