A beautiful little fool

I'm currently reading Zelda by Nancy Milford-- a biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby (did you catch that?). I love The Great Gatsby, and have been fascinated by the myth of F. Scott for a while, so when I came across Zelda's biography, I had to read it. I have not been disappointed!

I always knew that F. Scott included autobiographical elements to his writing, but I had no idea that he actually used Zelda as his model heroine for most of his books (until he had an affair when he was in his 40's and then he used his mistress as his model). He even went so far as to use her letters to him and her diary in direct quotes in his books. Who knew that what Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby says when her daughter was born is actually what Zelda said when her daughter, Scottie, was born: "I hope she'll be a fool. That's all a woman can amount to is this world, a beautiful little fool."

I didn't realize that Zelda was an authoress in her own right, but that most of her published writings were under both her and her husband's name, so she never received full credit for it. She became a completely reckless drunk in the 1920's, which is interesting since it was the era of Prohibition-- but she and Scott actually had their own personal bootlegger to keep them stocked. They were rich, famous, and the trend setters for the decade. In fact, F. Scott is credited with the name of it: The Roaring Twenties. They were friends with Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Pasos, and knew lots of other famous people of the 20's during their many stints of living in France, especially in Paris.

Sadly, Zelda suffered from a mental illness that required her to be in asylums or sanitariums or under close supervision for the last 12 years of her life.

After having lived the life of the flapper as the model flapper girl of the 1920's, Zelda perished a very literary death: in a fire that erupted in the middle of the night in the sanitarium where she was living.

For more information on the Fitzgeralds, see here: http://www.pbs.org/kteh/amstorytellers/bios.html