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Zelda Fitzgerald

Zelda Fitzgerald (Sayre; July 24, 1900 – March 10, 1948) was an American novelist, painter, and socialite. Born in Montgomery, Alabama, to a wealthy Southern family, she became locally famous for her beauty and high spirits. In 1920, she married writer F. Scott Fitzgerald after the popular success of his debut novel, This Side of Paradise. The novel catapulted the young couple into the public eye, and she became known in the national press as the first American flapper. Due to their wild antics and incessant partying, she and her husband became regarded in the newspapers as the enfants terribles of the Jazz Age. Alleged infidelity and bitter recriminations soon undermined their marriage. After traveling abroad to Europe, Zelda's mental health deteriorated, and she had suicidal and homicidal tendencies which required psychiatric care. Her doctors diagnosed Zelda with schizophrenia, although later posthumous diagnoses posit bipolar disorder.

While institutionalized at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, she authored the 1932 novel Save Me the Waltz, a semi-autobiographical account of her early life in the American South during the Jim Crow era and her marriage to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Upon its publication by Scribner's, the novel garnered mostly negative reviews and experienced poor sales. The critical and commercial failure of Save Me the Waltz disappointed Zelda and led her to pursue her other interests as a playwright and a painter. In Fall 1932, she completed a stage play titled Scandalabra, but Broadway producers unanimously declined to produce the play. Disheartened, Zelda next attempted to paint watercolors but, when her husband arranged their exhibition in 1934, the critical response proved equally disappointing.

While the two lived apart, Scott died of occlusive coronary arteriosclerosis in December 1940. After her husband's death, she attempted to write a second novel Caesar's Things, but her recurrent voluntary institutionalization for mental illness interrupted her writing, and she failed to complete the work. By this time, she had endured over ten years of electroshock therapy and insulin shock treatments, and she suffered from severe memory loss. In March 1948, while sedated and locked in a room on the fifth floor of Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, she died in a fire. Her body was identified by her dental records and one of her slippers. A follow-up investigation raised the possibility that the fire had been a work of arson by a disgruntled or mentally disturbed hospital employee.

A 1970 biography by Nancy Milford was a finalist for the National Book Award. After the success of Milford's biography, scholars viewed Zelda's artistic output in a new light. Her novel Save Me the Waltz became the focus of literary studies exploring different facets of the work: how her novel contrasted with Scott's depiction of their marriage in Tender Is the Night, and how 1920s consumer culture placed mental stress on modern women. Concurrently, renewed interest began in Zelda's artwork, and her paintings were posthumously exhibited in the United States and Europe. In 1992, she was inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame.

Early life and family background
Zelda Sayre was born in Montgomery, Alabama, on July 24, 1900, the youngest of six children. Her parents were Episcopalians. Her mother, Minerva Buckner "Minnie" Machen, named her daughter after the gypsy heroine in a novel, presumably Jane Howard's "Zelda: A Tale of the Massachusetts Colony" (1866) or Robert Edward Francillon's "Zelda's Fortune" (1874). Zelda was a spoiled child; her mother doted upon her daughter's every whim, but her father, Alabama politician Anthony Dickinson Sayre was a strict and remote man whom Zelda described as a "living fortress". Sayre was a state legislator in the post-Reconstruction era who authored the landmark 1893 Sayre Act which disenfranchised black Alabamians for seventy years and ushered in the racially segregated Jim Crow period in the state. There is scholarly speculation regarding whether Anthony Sayre sexually abused Zelda as a child based on later writings, but there is no evidence confirming that Zelda was a victim of incest.

At the time of Zelda's birth, her family was a prominent and influential Southern clan who had been slave-holders before the Civil War. According to biographer Nancy Milford, "if there was a Confederate establishment in the Deep South, Zelda Sayre came from the heart of it". Zelda's maternal grandfather was Willis Benson Machen, a Confederate Senator and later an U.S. Senator from Kentucky. Her father's uncle was John Tyler Morgan, a Confederate general and the second Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama. An outspoken advocate of lynching who served six terms in the United States Senate, Morgan played a key role in laying the foundation for the Jim Crow era in the American South. In addition to wielding considerable influence in national politics, Zelda's extended family owned the First White House of the Confederacy. According to biographer Sally Cline, "in Zelda's girlhood, ghosts of the late Confederacy drifted through the sleepy oak-lined streets," and Zelda claimed that she drew her strength from Montgomery's Confederate past.

During her idle youth in Montgomery, Zelda's affluent Southern family employed half-a-dozen domestic servants, many of whom were African-American. Consequently, Zelda was unaccustomed to domestic labor or responsibilities of any kind. As the privileged child of wealthy parents, she danced, took ballet lessons, and enjoyed the outdoors. In her youth, the family spent summers in Saluda, North Carolina, a village that would appear in her artwork decades later. In 1914, Zelda began attending Sidney Lanier High School. She was bright, but uninterested in her lessons. During high school, she continued her interest in ballet. She also drank gin, smoked cigarettes, and spent much of her time flirting with boys. A newspaper article about one of her dance performances quoted her as saying that she cared only about "boys and swimming".

She developed an appetite for attention, actively seeking to flout convention, whether by dancing or by wearing a tight, flesh-colored bathing suit to fuel rumors that she swam nude. Her father's reputation was something of a safety net, preventing her social ruin. Southern women of the time were expected to be delicate and docile, and Zelda's antics shocked the local community. Along with her childhood friend and future Hollywood star Tallulah Bankhead, she became a mainstay of Montgomery gossip. Her ethos was encapsulated beneath her graduation photo at Sidney Lanier High School in Montgomery: "Why should all life be work, when we all can borrow? Let's think only of today, and not worry about tomorrow." In her final year of high school, she was voted "prettiest" and "most attractive" in her graduating class.

Courtship by F. Scott Fitzgerald
In July 1918, Zelda Sayre first met aspiring novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald at the Montgomery Country Club. At the time, Fitzgerald had been freshly rejected by his first love, Chicago socialite and heiress Ginevra King, due to his lack of financial prospects. Heartbroken by this rejection, Scott had dropped out of Princeton University and volunteered for the United States Army amid World War I. While awaiting deployment to the Western front, he was stationed at Camp Sheridan, outside Montgomery.

While writing Ginevra King and begging her to resume their relationship, a lonely Fitzgerald began courting Zelda and other young Montgomery women. Scott called Zelda daily, and he visited Montgomery on his free days. He often spoke of his ambition to become a famous novelist, and he sent her a chapter of a book he was writing. At the time, Zelda dismissed Fitzgerald's remarks as mere boastfulness, and she concluded that he would never become a famous writer. Infatuated with Zelda, Scott redrafted the character of Rosalind Connage in his unpublished manuscript The Romantic Egotist to resemble her, and he told Zelda that "the heroine does resemble you in more ways than four."

In addition to inspiring the character of Rosalind Connage, Fitzgerald used a quote from Zelda's letters for a soliloquy by the narrator at the conclusion of The Romantic Egotist, later retitled and published as This Side of Paradise. Zelda wrote Fitzgerald a letter eulogizing the Confederate dead who perished during the American Civil War. "I've spent today in the graveyard... Isn't it funny how, out of a row of Confederate soldiers, two or three will make you think of dead lovers and dead loves—when they're exactly like the others, even to the yellowish moss," she wrote to Fitzgerald. In the final pages of his novel, Fitzgerald altered Zelda's sentiments to refer to Union soldiers instead of Confederates.

During the early months of their courtship, Zelda and Scott strolled through the Confederate Cemetery at Oakwood Cemetery. While walking past the headstones, Fitzgerald ostensibly failed to show sufficient reverence, and Zelda informed Fitzgerald that he would never understand how she felt about the Confederate dead. Fitzgerald drew upon Zelda's intense feelings about the Confederacy and the Old South in his 1920 short story The Ice Palace about a Southern girl who becomes lost in an ice maze while visiting a northern town.

While dating Zelda and other women in Montgomery, Fitzgerald received a letter from Ginevra King informing him of her engagement to polo player William "Bill" Mitchell. Three days after Ginevra King married Bill Mitchell on September 4, 1918, Scott professed his affections for Zelda. In his ledger, Scott wrote that he had fallen in love on September 7, 1918. His love for Zelda increased as time passed, and he wrote to his friend Isabelle Amorous: "I love her and that's the beginning and end of everything. You're still a Catholic, but Zelda's the only God I have left now." Ultimately, Zelda fell in love as well. Her biographer Nancy Milford wrote, "Scott had appealed to something in Zelda which no one before him had perceived: a romantic sense of self-importance which was kindred to his own."

Their courtship was interrupted in October when he was summoned north. He expected to be sent to France, but he was instead assigned to Camp Mills, Long Island. While he was there, the Allied Powers signed an armistice with Imperial Germany. He then returned to the base near Montgomery. Together again, Zelda and Scott now engaged in what he later described as sexual recklessness, and by December 1918, they had consummated their relationship. Although this was the first time they were sexually intimate, both Zelda and Scott had other sexual partners prior to their first meeting and courtship. Initially, Fitzgerald did not intend to marry Zelda, but the couple gradually viewed themselves as informally engaged, although Zelda declined to marry him until he proved financially successful.

On February 14, 1919, he was discharged from the military and went north to establish himself in New York City. During this time, Zelda mistakenly feared she was pregnant. Scott mailed her pills to induce an abortion, but Zelda refused to take them and replied in a letter: "I simply can't and won't take those awful pills... I'd rather have a whole family than sacrifice my self-respect... I'd feel like a damn whore if I took even one." They wrote frequently, and by March 1920, Scott had sent Zelda his mother's ring, and the two had become engaged. However, when Scott's attempts to become a published author faltered during the next four months, Zelda became convinced that he could not support her accustomed lifestyle, and she broke off the engagement during the Red Summer of 1919. Having been rejected by both Zelda and Ginevra during the past year due to his lack of financial prospects, Scott suffered from intense despair, and he carried a revolver daily while contemplating suicide.

Soon after, in July 1919, Fitzgerald returned to St. Paul. Having returned to his hometown as a failure, Fitzgerald became a social recluse and lived on the top floor of his parents' home at 599 Summit Avenue, on Cathedral Hill. He decided to make one last attempt to become a novelist and to stake everything on the success of a book. Abstaining from alcohol and parties, he worked day and night to revise The Romantic Egotist as This Side of Paradise—an autobiographical account of his Princeton years and his romances with Ginevra, Zelda, and others. At the time, Fitzgerald's feelings for Zelda were at an all-time low, and he remarked to a friend, "I wouldn't care if she died, but I couldn't stand to have anybody else marry her."

Marriage and celebrity
By September 1919, Scott completed his first novel, This Side of Paradise, and editor Maxwell Perkins of Charles Scribner's Sons accepted the manuscript for publication. Scott requested an accelerated release to renew Zelda's faith in him: "I have so many things dependent on its success—including of course a girl." After Scott informed Zelda of his novel's upcoming publication, a shocked Zelda replied apologetically: "I hate to say this, but I don't think I had much confidence in you at first.... It's so nice to know you really can do things do—anything—and I love to feel that maybe I can help just a little."

Zelda agreed to marry Scott once Scribner's published the novel; in turn, Fitzgerald promised to bring her to New York with "all the iridescence of the beginning of the world." Scribner's published This Side of Paradise on March 26, 1920, and Zelda arrived in New York on March 30. A few days later, on April 3, 1920, they married in a small ceremony at St. Patrick's Cathedral.

At the time of their wedding, Fitzgerald later claimed neither he nor Zelda still loved each other, and the early years of their marriage in New York City proved to be a disappointment. According to biographer Andrew Turnbull, "victory was sweet, though not as sweet as it would have been six months earlier before Zelda had rejected him. Fitzgerald couldn't recapture the thrill of their first love". As the affections between Zelda and Scott cooled, her husband continued to obsess over the loss of his first love Ginevra King and, for the remainder of their marriage, Scott could not think of Ginevra "without tears coming to his eyes".

Despite the cooling of their affections, Scott and Zelda quickly became celebrities of New York, as much for their wild behavior as for the success of This Side of Paradise. They were ordered to leave both the Biltmore Hotel and the Commodore Hotel for disturbing other guests. Their daily lives consisted of outrageous pranks and drunken escapades. While fully dressed, they jumped into the water fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel in New York. They frequently hired taxicabs and rode on the hood. One evening, while inebriated, they decided to visit the county morgue where they inspected the unidentified corpses and, on another evening, Zelda insisted on sleeping in a dog kennel. Alcohol increasingly fueled their nightly escapades. Publicly, this meant little more than napping when they arrived at parties, but privately it increasingly led to bitter arguments. To their mutual delight, New York newspapers depicted Zelda and Scott as cautionary examples of youth and excess—the enfants terribles of the hedonistic Jazz Age.

After a month of hotel evictions, the Fitzgeralds moved to a cottage in Westport, Connecticut, where Scott worked on drafts of his second novel. Due to her privileged upbringing with many African-American servants, Zelda could not perform household responsibilities at Westport. During the early months of their marriage, Scott's unwashed clothes began disappearing. One day, he opened a closet and discovered his dirty clothes piled to the ceiling. Uncertain of what to do with unwashed clothes, Zelda had never sent them out for cleaning: she had simply tossed everything into the closet.

Soon after, Scott employed two maids and a laundress. Zelda's complete dependence upon servants became the comedic focus of magazine articles. When Harper & Brothers asked Zelda to contribute her favorite recipes in an article, she wrote: "See if there is any bacon, and if there is, ask the cook which pan to fry it in. Then ask if there are any eggs, and if so try and persuade the cook to poach two of them. It is better not to attempt toast, as it burns very easily. Also, in the case of bacon, do not turn the fire too high, or you will have to get out of the house for a week. Serve preferably on china plates, though gold or wood will do if handy."

While Scott attempted to write his next novel at their home in Westport, Zelda announced that she was homesick for the Deep South. In particular, she missed eating Southern cuisine such as peaches and biscuits for breakfast. She suggested that they travel to Montgomery, Alabama. On July 15, 1920, the couple traveled in a touring car—which Scott derogatorily nicknamed "the rolling junk"—to her parents' home in Montgomery. After visiting Zelda's family for several weeks, they abandoned the unreliable vehicle and returned via train to Westport, Connecticut. Zelda's parents visited their Westport cottage soon after, but her father Judge Anthony Sayre took a dim view of the couples' constant partying and scandalous lifestyle. Following this visit, the Fitzgeralds relocated to an apartment at 38 West 59th Street in New York City.

Pregnancy and Scottie
In February 1921, while Scott labored on drafts of his inchoate second novel The Beautiful and Damned, Zelda discovered she was pregnant. She requested that the child be born on Southern soil in Alabama, but Fitzgerald adamantly refused. Zelda wrote despondently to a friend: "Scott's changed... He used... to say he loved the South, but now he wants to get as far away from it as he can." To Zelda's chagrin, her husband insisted upon having the baby at his northern home in Saint Paul, Minnesota. On October 26, 1921, she gave birth to Frances "Scottie" Fitzgerald. As she emerged from the anesthesia, Scott recorded Zelda saying, "Oh, God, goofo I'm drunk. Mark Twain. Isn't she smart—she has the hiccups. I hope it's beautiful and a fool—a beautiful little fool." Many of her words found their way into Scott's novels: in The Great Gatsby, the character Daisy Buchanan expresses a similar hope for her daughter.

While writing The Beautiful and Damned, Scott drew upon "bits and pieces" of Zelda's diary and letters. He modeled the characters of Anthony Patch on himself and Gloria Patch on—in his words—the chill-mindedness and selfishness of Zelda. Prior to publication, Zelda proofread the drafts, and she urged her husband to cut the cerebral ending which focused on the main characters' lost idealism. Upon its publication, Burton Rascoe, the newly appointed literary editor of the New York Tribune, approached Zelda for an opportunity to entice readers with a satirical review of Scott's latest work as a publicity stunt.

Although Zelda had carefully proofread drafts of the novel, she pretended in her review to read the novel for the very first time, and she wrote partly in jest that "on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine... and, also, scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald—I believe that is how he spells his name—seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home." In the same review, Zelda joked that she hoped her husband's novel would become a commercial success as "there is the cutest cloth of gold dress for only $300 in a store on Forty-second Street".

The satirical review led to Zelda receiving offers from other magazines to write stories and articles. According to their daughter, Scott "spent many hours editing the short stories she sold to College Humor and to Scribner's Magazine". In June 1922, Metropolitan Magazine published an essay by Zelda Fitzgerald titled "Eulogy on the Flapper". At the time flappers were typically young, modern women who bobbed their hair and wore short skirts. They also drank alcohol and had premarital sex. Though ostensibly a piece about the decline of the flapper lifestyle after its heyday in the early 1920s, Zelda's biographer Nancy Milford wrote that Zelda's essay served as "a defense of her own code of existence." In the article, Zelda described the ephemeral phenomenon of the flapper:

"The Flapper awoke from her lethargy of sub-deb-ism, bobbed her hair, put on her choicest pair of earrings and a great deal of audacity and rouge and went into the battle. She flirted because it was fun to flirt and wore a one-piece bathing suit because she had a good figure ... she was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do. Mothers disapproved of their sons taking the Flapper to dances, to teas, to swim and most of all to heart."

After the publication of The Beautiful and Damned in March 1922, the Fitzgeralds traveled to either New York or St. Paul in order for Zelda to procure an abortion. Ultimately, Zelda would have three abortions during their marriage, and her sister Rosalind later questioned whether Zelda's later mental deterioration was due to health side-effects of these unsafe procedures. Zelda's thoughts on terminating her second pregnancy are unknown, but in the first draft of The Beautiful and Damned, Scott wrote a scene in which Gloria Gilbert believes she is pregnant and Anthony Patch suggests she "talk to some woman and find out what's best to be done. Most of them fix it some way." Anthony's suggestion was removed from the final version, and this significant alteration shifted the focus from a moral dilemma about the act of abortion to Gloria's superficial concern that a baby would ruin her figure.

Following the financial failure of Scott's play The Vegetable, the Fitzgeralds found themselves mired in debt. Although Scott wrote short stories furiously to pay the bills, he became burned out and depressed. During this period, while Scott wrote short stories at home, the New York Police Department detained Zelda near the Queensboro Bridge on the suspicion of her being the "Bobbed Haired Bandit," an infamous spree-robber later identified as Celia Cooney. Following this incident, the couple departed in April 1924 for Paris, France, in the hope of living a more frugal existence abroad in Europe.

Expatriation to Europe
After arriving in Paris, the couple soon relocated to Antibes on the French Riviera. While Scott labored on drafts of The Great Gatsby, Zelda became infatuated with a French naval aviator, Edouard Jozan. The exact details of the supposed romance are unverifiable and contradictory, and Jozan himself claimed the Fitzgeralds invented the entire incident. According to conflicting accounts, Zelda spent afternoons swimming at the beach and evenings dancing at the casinos with Jozan. After several weeks, she asked Scott for a divorce. Scott purportedly challenged Jozan to duel and locked Zelda in their villa until he could kill him. Before any fatal confrontation could occur, Jozan—who had no intention of marrying Zelda—fled the Riviera, and the Fitzgeralds never saw him again. Soon after, Zelda possibly overdosed on sleeping pills.

On his part, Jozan dismissed the entire story as pure fabrication and claimed no romance with Zelda had ever occurred: "They both had a need of drama, they made it up and perhaps they were the victims of their own unsettled and a little unhealthy imagination." In later retellings, both Zelda and Scott embellished the story, and Zelda later falsely told Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley Richardson that the affair ended when Jozan committed suicide. In fact, Jozan had been transferred by the French military to Indochina.

Regardless of whether any extramarital affair with Jozan occurred, the episode led to a breach of trust in their marriage, and Fitzgerald wrote in his notebook, "I knew something had happened that could never be repaired." The incident likely influenced Fitzgerald's writing of The Great Gatsby, and he drew upon many elements of his tempestuous relationship with Zelda, including the loss of certainty in her love. In August, he wrote to his friend Ludlow Fowler: "I feel old too, this summer ... the whole burden of this novel—the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world that you don't care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory."

Scott finalized The Great Gatsby in October 1924. The couple attempted to celebrate with travel to Rome and Capri, but both were unhappy and unhealthy. When he received the galleys for his novel, Scott fretted over the best title: Trimalchio in West Egg, just Trimalchio or Gatsby, Gold-hatted Gatsby, or The High-bouncing Lover. Disliking Fitzgerald's chosen title of Trimalchio in West Egg, editor Max Perkins persuaded him that the reference was too obscure and that people would be unable to pronounce it. After both Zelda and Perkins expressed their preference for The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald agreed. It was also on this trip, while ill with colitis, that Zelda began painting artworks.

Meeting Ernest Hemingway
Returning to Paris in April 1925, Zelda met Ernest Hemingway, whose career her husband did much to promote. Through Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds were introduced to Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Robert McAlmon, and others. Scott and Hemingway became close friends, but Zelda and Hemingway disliked each other from their first meeting. She openly referred to him with homophobic slurs and denounced him as a "fairy with hair on his chest". She considered Hemingway's domineering macho persona to be merely a posture to conceal his homosexuality; in turn, Hemingway told Scott that Zelda was "insane". In his memoir A Moveable Feast, Hemingway claims he realized that Zelda had a mental illness when she insisted that jazz singer Al Jolson was greater than Jesus Christ. Hemingway alleged that Zelda sought to destroy her husband, and she purportedly taunted Fitzgerald over his penis' size. After examining it in a public restroom, Hemingway confirmed Fitzgerald's penis to be of average size.

Hemingway claimed that Zelda urged her husband to write lucrative short stories as opposed to novels in order to support her accustomed lifestyle. To supplement their income, Fitzgerald often wrote stories for magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's Weekly, and Esquire. "I always felt a story in The Post was tops", Zelda later recalled, "But Scott couldn't stand to write them. He was completely cerebral, you know. All mind." Scott would write his stories in an 'authentic' manner, then rewrite them to add plot twists which increased their salability as magazine stories. This "whoring" for Zelda—as Hemingway dubbed these sales—emerged as a sore point in their friendship. After reading The Great Gatsby, Hemingway vowed to put any differences with Fitzgerald aside and to aid him in any way he could, although he feared Zelda would derail Fitzgerald's career. In a letter to Fitzgerald, Hemingway warned him that Zelda would derail his career:

"Of all people on earth you needed discipline in your work and instead you marry someone who is jealous of your work, wants to compete with you and ruins you. It's not as simple as that and I thought Zelda was crazy the first time I met her and you complicated it even more by being in love with her and, of course, you're a rummy."

A more serious rift in the Fitzgerald's marriage occurred when Zelda suspected that Scott was closeted homosexual, and she alleged that Fitzgerald and Hemingway engaged in homosexual relations. In the ensuing months, she frequently belittled Scott with homophobic slurs during their public excursions. Biographer Matthew J. Bruccoli posits that Zelda's inordinate preoccupation with other persons' sexual behavior likely indicated the onset of her paranoid schizophrenia. However, Fitzgerald's sexuality was a popular subject of debate among his friends and acquaintances. As a youth, Fitzgerald had a close relationship with Father Sigourney Fay, a possibly gay Catholic priest, and Fitzgerald later used his last name for the idealized romantic character of Daisy Fay Buchanan. After college, Fitzgerald cross-dressed during outings in Minnesota and flirted with men at social events. While staying in Paris, rumors dogged Fitzgerald among the American expat community that he was gay.

Irritated by Zelda's recurrent homophobic attacks on his sexual identity, Scott decided to have sex with a Parisian prostitute. Zelda found condoms that he had purchased before any sexual encounter occurred, and a bitter quarrel ensued, resulting in ingravescent jealousy. Soon after, a jealous Zelda threw herself down a flight of marble stairs at a party because Fitzgerald, engrossed in talking to American dancer Isadora Duncan, ignored her. In December 1926, after two unpleasant years in Europe which considerably strained their marriage, the Fitzgeralds returned to America, but their marital difficulties continued to fester.

In January 1927, the Fitzgeralds relocated to Los Angeles where Scott wrote Lipstick for United Artists and met Hollywood starlet Lois Moran. Jealous of Moran, Zelda set fire to her clothing in a bathtub as a self-destructive act. She disparaged Moran as "a breakfast food that many men identified with whatever they missed from life." Fitzgerald's relations with Moran exacerbated the Fitzgeralds' marital difficulties and, after merely two months in Hollywood, the unhappy couple relocated to Ellerslie in Wilmington, Delaware, in March 1927. Literary critic Edmund Wilson, recalling a party at the Fitzgerald home in Edgemoor, Delaware, in February 1928, described Zelda as follows:

"I sat next to Zelda, who was at her iridescent best. Some of Scott's friends were irritated; others were enchanted, by her. I was one of the ones who were charmed. She had the waywardness of a Southern belle and the lack of inhibitions of a child. She talked with so spontaneous a color and wit—almost exactly in the way she wrote—that I very soon ceased to be troubled by the fact that the conversation was in the nature of a 'free association' of ideas and one could never follow up anything. I have rarely known a woman who expressed herself so delightfully and so freshly: she had no ready-made phrases on the one hand and made no straining for effect on the other. It evaporated easily, however, and I remember only one thing she said that night: that the writing of Galsworthy was a shade of blue for which she did not care."

Obsession and illness
By 1927, at the Ellersie estate in Wilmington, Delaware, Scott had become severely alcoholic, and Zelda's behavior became increasingly erratic. Much of the conflict between them stemmed from the boredom and isolation Zelda experienced when Scott was writing. She would often interrupt him when he was working, and the two grew increasingly miserable. Stung by Fitzgerald's criticism that all great women use their talents constructively, Zelda had a deep desire to develop a talent that was entirely her own.

At the age of 28, she became obsessed with Russian ballet, and she decided to embark upon a career as a prima ballerina. Her friend Gerald Murphy counseled against their ambition and remarked that "there are limits to what a woman of Zelda's age can do and it was obvious that she had taken up the dance too late." Despite being far too old to achieve such an ambition, Scott Fitzgerald paid for Zelda to begin practicing under the tutelage of Catherine Littlefield, director of the Philadelphia Opera Ballet. After the Fitzgeralds returned to Europe in summer 1928, Scott paid for Zelda to study under Russian ballerina Lubov Egorova in Paris.

In September 1929, the San Carlo Opera Ballet Company in Naples invited her to join their ballet school. In preparation, Zelda undertook a grueling daily practice of up to eight hours a day, and she "punished her body in strenuous efforts to improve." According to Zelda's daughter, although Scott "greatly appreciated and encouraged his wife's unusual talents and ebullient imagination," he became alarmed when her "dancing became a twenty-four-hour preoccupation which was destroying her physical and mental health." Soon after, Zelda collapsed from physical and mental exhaustion. One evening, Scott returned home to find an exhausted Zelda seated on the floor and entranced with a pile of sand. When he asked her what she was doing, she could not speak. He summoned a French physician, who examined Zelda and informed him that "your wife is mad."

Soon after her physical and mental collapse, Zelda's mental health further deteriorated. In October 1929, during an automobile trip to Paris along the mountainous roads of the Grande Corniche, Zelda seized the car's steering wheel and tried to kill herself, her husband, and her nine-year-old daughter Scottie by driving over a cliff. After this homicidal incident, Zelda sought psychiatric treatment. On April 23, 1930, the Malmaison Clinic near Paris admitted her for observation. On May 22, 1930, she moved to Valmont sanatorium in Montreux, Switzerland. The clinic primarily treated gastrointestinal ailments and, due to her profound psychological problems, she was moved again to a psychiatric facility in Prangins on the shores of Lake Geneva on June 5, 1930. At Prangins in June, Dr. Oscar Forel issued a tentative diagnosis of schizophrenia, but he feared her psychological condition might be far worse. Zelda's biographer, Nancy Milford, quotes Dr. Forel's full diagnosis at length:

"The more I saw Zelda, the more I thought at the time [that] she is neither [suffering from] a pure neurosis nor a real psychosis—I considered her a constitutional, emotionally unbalanced psychopath—she may improve, [but] never completely recover."

After five months of observation, Doctor Eugen Bleuler—one of Europe's leading psychiatrists—confirmed Dr. Forel's diagnosis of Zelda as a schizophrenic on November 22, 1930. (Following Zelda's death, later psychiatrists speculated that Zelda instead had bipolar disorder.) She was released from Prangins in September 1931. In an attempt to keep his wife out of an asylum, Scott hired nurses and attendants to care for Zelda at all times. Although there were periods where her behavior was merely eccentric, she could frequently become a danger to herself and others. In one instance, she attempted to throw herself in front of a moving train and, in another instance, she attacked a visiting guest at their home without provocation. Despite her precarious mental health, the couple traveled to Montgomery, Alabama, where her father, Judge Anthony Sayre, lay dying. After her father's death, her mental health again deteriorated and she had another breakdown.

Save Me the Waltz
In February 1932, after an episode of hysteria, Zelda insisted that she be readmitted to a mental hospital. On February 12, 1932, over her husband's objections, the The Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore admitted Fitzgerald, where her treatment was overseen by Dr. Adolf Meyer, an expert on schizophrenia. As part of her recovery routine, she spent at least two hours a day writing a manuscript. At the Phipps Clinic, Zelda developed a bond with Dr. Mildred Squires, a female resident. When Dr. Squires asked Scott to speculate why Zelda's mental health had deteriorated, Fitzgerald replied:

"Perhaps fifty percent of our friends and relatives would tell you in all honest conviction that my drinking drove Zelda insane—the other half would assure you that her insanity drove me to drink. Neither judgement would mean anything."

Toward the end of February 1932, Zelda shared fragments of her manuscript with Dr. Squires, who wrote to Scott that the unfinished novel was vivid and had charm. Zelda wrote to Scott from the hospital, "I am proud of my novel, but I can hardly restrain myself enough to get it written. You will like it—It is distinctly École Fitzgerald, though more ecstatic than yours—perhaps too much so." Zelda finished the novel on March 9. She sent the unaltered manuscript to Scott's editor, Maxwell Perkins, at Scribner's.

Surprised to receive an unannounced novel in the mail from Zelda, Perkins carefully perused the manuscript. He concluded the work had "a slightly deranged quality which gave him the impression that the author had difficulty in separating fiction from reality." He felt the manuscript contained several good sections, but its overall tone seemed hopelessly "dated" and tonally resembled Fitzgerald's 1922 work The Beautiful and Damned. Perkins hoped that her husband might be able to improve its overall quality with his criticism.

Upon learning that Zelda had submitted her manuscript to Perkins, Scott became angry that she had not shown her manuscript to him beforehand. After reading the manuscript, he objected to her novel's plagiarism of his protagonist in This Side of Paradise. He was further upset to learn that Zelda's novel used the very same plot elements as his upcoming novel, Tender Is the Night. After receiving letters from Scott delineating these objections, Zelda wrote to Scott apologetically that she was "afraid we might have touched the same material."

Despite Scott's initial annoyance, a debt-ridden Fitzgerald realized that Zelda's book might earn a tidy profit. Consequently, his requested revisions were "relatively few", and "the disagreement was quickly resolved, with Scott recommending the novel to Perkins." Several weeks later, Scott wrote to Perkins: "Here is Zelda's novel. It is a good novel now, perhaps a very good novel—I am too close to tell. It has the faults and virtues of a first novel.... It should interest the many thousands in dancing. It is about something and absolutely new, and should sell." Although unimpressed, Perkins agreed to publish the work as a way for Fitzgerald to repay his financial debt to Scribner's. Perkins arranged for half of Zelda's royalties to be applied against Scott's debt to Scribner's until at least $5,000 had been repaid.

In March 1932, the Phipps Clinic discharged Zelda, and she joined her husband Scott and her daughter at the La Paix estate in Baltimore, Maryland. Although discharged, she remained mentally unwell. One month later, Fitzgerald took her to lunch with critic H. L. Mencken, the literary editor of The American Mercury. In his diary, Mencken noted Zelda "went insane in Paris a year or so ago, and is still plainly more or less off her base." Throughout the luncheon, she manifested signs of mental distress. A year later, when Mencken met Zelda for the last time, he described her mental illness as immediately evident to any onlooker and her mind as "only half sane." He regretted that F. Scott Fitzgerald could not write novels, as he had to write magazine stories to pay for Zelda's psychiatric treatment.

On October 7, 1932, Scribner's published Save Me the Waltz with a printing of 3,010 copies—not unusually low for a first novel in the middle of the Great Depression—on cheap paper, with a cover of green linen. According to Zelda, the book derived its title from a Victor record catalog, and the title evoked the romantic glitter of the lifestyle which F. Scott Fitzgerald and herself experienced during the riotous Jazz Age. The parallels to the Fitzgeralds were obvious: The protagonist of the novel is Alabama Beggs—like Zelda, the daughter of a Southern judge—who marries David Knight, an aspiring painter who abruptly becomes famous for his work. They live the fast life in Connecticut before departing to live in France. Dissatisfied with her marriage, Alabama throws herself into ballet. Though told she has no chance, she perseveres and after three years becomes the lead dancer in an opera company. Alabama becomes ill from exhaustion, however, and the novel ends when they return to her family in the South, as her father is dying.

Echoing Zelda's frustrations, the novel portrays Alabama's struggle to establish herself independently of her husband and to earn respect for her own accomplishments. In contrast to Scott's unadorned prose, Zelda's writing style in Save Me the Waltz is replete with verbal flourishes and complex metaphors. The novel is also deeply sensual; as literary scholar Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin observed in 1979, "the sensuality arises from Alabama's awareness of the life surge within her, the consciousness of the body, the natural imagery through which not only emotions but simple facts are expressed, the overwhelming presence of the senses, in particular touch and smell, in every description."

The reviews of Save Me the Waltz by literary critics were overwhelmingly negative. The critics savaged Zelda's florid prose as overwritten, attacked her fictional characters as uninteresting, and mocked her tragic scenes as grotesquely "harlequinade". The New York Times published a particularly harsh review and lambasted her editor Max Perkins: "It is not only that her publishers have not seen fit to curb an almost ludicrous lushness of writing but they have not given the book the elementary services of a literate proofreader." The overwhelmingly negative reviews bewildered and distressed Zelda.

Painting and later years
From the mid-1930s onward, Zelda would be hospitalized sporadically for the rest of her life at sanatoriums in Baltimore, New York, and in Asheville, North Carolina. When Scott visited Zelda in the sanatoriums, she increasingly exhibited signs of mental instability. During one visit, Scott and friends took Zelda on an outing to a nearby home in Tryon, North Carolina. During the lunch, she became withdrawn and ceased communication. On the return drive to the sanatorium, she wrenched open the car door and threw herself out of the moving vehicle in an attempt to kill herself. In another incident, Zelda's unexpected loss of a tennis match at the Asheville sanatorium resulted in her physically attacking her tennis partner and beating them over the head with her tennis racket.

Despite the deterioration of her mental health, she continued pursuing her artistic ambitions. After the critical and commercial failure of Save Me the Waltz, she attempted to write a farcical stage play titled Scandalabra in Fall 1932. However, after submitting the manuscript to agent Harold Ober, Broadway producers rejected her play. Following this rejection, Scott arranged for her play Scandalabra to be staged by a Little Theater group in Baltimore, Maryland, and he sat through long hours of rehearsals of the play. A year later, during a group therapy session with her husband and a psychiatrist, Fitzgerald remarked that she was "a third-rate writer and a third-rate ballet dancer." Following this remark, Zelda attempted to paint watercolors while in and out of sanatoriums.

In March 1934, Scott Fitzgerald arranged the first exhibition of Zelda's artwork—13 paintings and 15 drawings—in New York City. As with the tepid reception of her book, New York critics were ill-disposed towards her paintings. The New Yorker described them merely as "paintings by the almost mythical Zelda Fitzgerald; with whatever emotional overtones or associations may remain from the so-called Jazz Age." No actual description of the paintings was provided in the review.

Following the critical failure of her artwork exhibition, Scott awoke one morning to discover Zelda had gone missing. After the arrival of a doctor and several attendants, a manhunt ensued in New York City. Ultimately, they found Zelda in Central Park digging a grave. Soon after, she became even more violent and reclusive. In 1936, Scott placed her in the Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, writing to friends:

"Zelda now claims to be in direct contact with Christ, William the Conqueror, Mary Stuart, Apollo and all the stock paraphernalia of insane-asylum jokes ... For what she has really suffered, there is never a sober night that I do not pay a stark tribute of an hour to in the darkness. In an odd way, perhaps incredible to you, she was always my child (it was not reciprocal as it often is in marriages) ... I was her great reality, often the only liaison agent who could make the world tangible to her."

Zelda remained in the hospital while Scott returned to Hollywood for a $1,000-a-week job with MGM in June 1937. Estranged from Zelda, he attempted to reunite with his first love Ginevra King when she visited California in October 1938, but his uncontrolled alcoholism sabotaged their brief reunion. When a disappointed King returned to Chicago, Fitzgerald settled into a clandestine relationship with Hollywood gossip columnist Sheilah Graham. Throughout their relationship, Graham claimed Fitzgerald felt constant guilt over Zelda's mental illness and confinement. He repeatedly attempted sobriety, had depression, had violent outbursts, and attempted suicide.

For the next several years, a depressed Scott continued screenwriting on the West Coast and visiting a hospitalized Zelda on the East Coast. In April 1939, a coterie from Zelda's mental hospital had planned to go to Cuba, but Zelda had missed the trip. The Fitzgeralds decided to go on their own. The trip proved to be a disaster. During this trip, spectators at a cockfight beat F. Scott Fitzgerald when he tried to intervene against animal cruelty. He returned to the United States so exhausted and intoxicated that he required hospitalization. The Fitzgeralds never saw each other again.

Scott returned to Hollywood in order to pay the ever-increasing bills for Zelda's continued hospitalization. She made some progress in Asheville, and in March 1940, four years after admittance, she was discharged to her mother's care. She was nearly forty now, her friends were long gone, and the Fitzgeralds no longer had much money. They wrote to each other frequently, and they made plans to meet again in December 1940. In a letter Zelda wrote to Fitzgerald shortly before he died of a heart attack, she said: "I am sorry that there should be nothing to greet you but an empty shell . . . I love you anyway . . . even if there isn't any me or any love or even any life . . . I love you." Their planned rendezvous did not occur due to Scott's death of occlusive coronary arteriosclerosis at 44 years of age in December 1940. Due to her fragile mental health, Zelda could not attend his funeral in Rockville, Maryland.

After Scott's death, Zelda read his unfinished manuscript titled The Love of the Last Tycoon. She wrote to his friend Edmund Wilson who agreed to edit the book and to eulogize his legacy. Zelda believed Scott's work contained "an American temperament grounded in belief in oneself and 'will-to-survive' that Scott's contemporaries had relinquished. Scott, she insisted, had not. His work possessed a vitality and stamina because of his indefatigable faith in himself." After reading The Last Tycoon, Zelda began work on a new novel, Caesar's Things. As she had missed Scott's funeral due to her mental health, she likewise missed Scottie's wedding. By August 1943, she returned to the Highland Hospital. She worked on her novel while checking in and out of the hospital. She did not get better, and she did not finish the novel.

Hospital fire and death
Towards the end of her life, Zelda resided in and out of sanatoriums. Zelda checked back into the hospital in September 1946, and then she returned to live with her mother Minnie in their Alabama home. By this point in her life, she had undergone over ten years of electroshock therapy and insulin shock treatments. Consequently, she now "suffered from severe loss of memory and an apathetic personality due to constant shock therapies."

Possibly due to these treatments or her deteriorated mental health, she espoused fascism as a political ideology. According to biographer Nancy Milford, Zelda became "taken with the idea of fascism as a way of holding everything together, of ordering the masses." When acquaintance Henry Dan Piper visited Zelda in March 1947, she declared that fascism served "to keep things from falling apart and to keep the finer things from being lost or extinguished."

In November 1947, Zelda returned for the last time to Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. Due to insulin treatments her weight ballooned to 130 pounds. Acquaintance Edna Garlington Spratt recalled Zelda's grim appearance in the final months before her death: "She was anything but pretty when I saw her. She acted normal, but she looked so dreadful. Her hair was stringy and she had lost all pride in herself." Early in March 1948, her doctors told her she was better and she could leave, but she allegedly stayed for further treatment.

On the night of March 10, 1948, a fire broke out in the hospital kitchen. Zelda had been sedated and locked in a room on the fifth floor, possibly awaiting shock therapy. The fire moved through the dumbwaiter shaft, spreading onto every floor. The fire escapes were wooden, and they caught fire as well. Nine women, including Zelda, died. She was identified by her dental records and, according to other reports, one of her slippers. A follow-up investigation raised the unconfirmed possibility that the fire had been a work of arson by Willie Mae, a disgruntled or mentally disturbed hospital employee who had initiated the fire in the kitchen.

Zelda and Scott were buried in Rockville, Maryland, originally in Rockville Cemetery, away from his family plot. Only one photograph of the original gravesite is known to exist, taken in 1970 by Fitzgerald scholar Richard Anderson and published in 2016. At her daughter Scottie's request, Zelda and Scott were interred with the other Fitzgeralds at Saint Mary's Catholic Cemetery. Inscribed on their tombstone is the final sentence of The Great Gatsby: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Critical reappraisal
At the time of his third and fatal heart attack in December 1940, her husband Scott Fitzgerald died believing himself to be a failure as a writer. Two years later, after the United States' entrance into World War II, an association of publishing executives created the Council on Books in Wartime which distributed 155,000 copies of The Great Gatsby to U.S. soldiers overseas, and the book proved popular among beleaguered troops. By 1944, a full-scale Fitzgerald revival had occurred. Despite the renewed interest in Scott's oeuvre, Zelda's death in March 1948 was little noted in the press.

In 1950, acquaintance and screenwriter Budd Schulberg wrote The Disenchanted, with characters based recognizably on the Fitzgeralds who end up as forgotten former celebrities, he awash with alcohol and she befuddled by mental illness. It was followed in 1951 by Cornell University professor Arthur Mizener's The Far Side of Paradise, a biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald that rekindled interest in the couple among scholars. Mizener's biography was serialized in The Atlantic Monthly, and a story about the book appeared in Life magazine. Scott was depicted as a fascinating failure; Zelda's mental health was largely blamed for his lost potential.

In 1970, however, the history of Zelda and Scott's marriage saw its most profound revision in a book by Nancy Milford, a graduate student at Columbia University. Zelda: A Biography, the first book-length treatment of Zelda's life, became a finalist for the National Book Award and figured for weeks on The New York Times best-seller list. The book recast Zelda as an artist in her own right whose talents were belittled by a controlling husband. Zelda posthumously became an icon of the feminist movement in the 1970s—a woman whose unappreciated potential had been suppressed by patriarchal society.

After the success of Milford's 1970 biography, scholars began to view Zelda's work in a new light. Prior to Milford's biography, scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli had written in 1968 that Zelda's novel Save Me the Waltz was "worth reading partly because anything that illuminates the career of F. Scott Fitzgerald is worth reading—and because it is the only published novel of a brave and talented woman who is remembered for her defeats." However, in the wake of Milford's biography, a new perspective emerged, and scholar Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin wrote in 1979: "Save Me the Waltz is a moving and fascinating novel which should be read on its own terms equally as much as Tender Is the Night. It needs no other justification than its comparative excellence." After Milford's 1970 biography, Save Me the Waltz became the focus of many literary studies that explored different aspects of her work: how the novel contrasted with Scott's depiction of their marriage in Tender Is the Night, and how the consumer culture that emerged in the 1920s placed stress on modern women.

In 1991, Zelda's collected writings including Save Me the Waltz were edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and published. Reviewing the collection, The New York Times literary critic Michiko Kakutani wrote "that the novel was written in two months is amazing. That for all its flaws it still manages to charm, amuse and move the reader is even more remarkable. Zelda Fitzgerald succeeded, in this novel, in conveying her own heroic desperation to succeed at something of her own, and she also managed to distinguish herself as a writer with, as Edmund Wilson once said of her husband, a 'gift for turning language into something iridescent and surprising.'"

In addition to a critical reappraisal of her novel, Zelda's artwork also has been reappraised as interesting in its own right. After spending much of the 1950s and 1960s in family attics—Zelda's mother even had much of the art burned because she disliked it—her work drew the renewed interest of scholars. Posthumous exhibitions of her watercolors have toured the United States and Europe. A review of the exhibition by curator Everl Adair noted the influence of Vincent van Gogh and Georgia O'Keeffe on her paintings and concluded that her surviving corpus of art "represents the work of a talented, visionary woman who rose above tremendous odds to create a fascinating body of work—one that inspires us to celebrate the life that might have been."

Scholars continue to debate the role that Zelda and Scott may have had in inspiring and stifling each other's creativity. Biographer Sally Cline wrote that the two camps can be "as diametrically opposed as the Plath and Hughes literary camps"—a reference to the heated controversy about the relationship of husband–wife poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. In particular, partisan scholars of Zelda frequently depict Scott Fitzgerald as a domineering husband who drove his wife insane.

In response to this narrative, Zelda's daughter Scottie Fitzgerald wrote an essay dispelling such "inaccurate" interpretations. She particularly objected to revisionist depictions of her mother as "the classic 'put down' wife, whose efforts to express her artistic nature were thwarted by a typically male chauvinist husband". In contrast, Scottie insisted "that my father greatly appreciated and encouraged his wife's unusual talents and ebullient imagination. Not only did he arrange for the first showing of her paintings in New York in 1934 he sat through long hours of rehearsals of her one play, Scandalabra, staged by a Little Theater group in Baltimore; he spent many hours editing the short stories she told to College Humor and to Scribner's Magazine." Towards the end of her life, Scottie wrote a final coda about her parents to a biographer: "I have never been able to buy the notion that it was my father's drinking which led her to the sanitarium. Nor do I think she led him to the drinking."

Legacy and influence
Zelda was the inspiration for "Witchy Woman", the song of seductive enchantresses written by Don Henley and Bernie Leadon for the Eagles, after Henley read Zelda's biography; of the muse, the partial genius behind her husband F. Scott Fitzgerald, the wild, bewitching, mesmerizing, quintessential "flapper" of the Jazz Age.

Zelda's name served as inspiration for Princess Zelda, the eponymous character of The Legend of Zelda series of video games. In 2003, a wild turkey which roamed Battery Park in New York City was named Zelda due to a famous episode when, during one of her nervous breakdowns, she went missing and was found in Battery Park, apparently having walked several miles downtown. In 1989, the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald museum opened in Montgomery, Alabama. The museum is in a house they briefly rented in 1931 and 1932. It is one of the few places where some of Zelda's paintings are kept on display.

In 1992, Zelda and her daughter Scottie were posthumously inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame.

In 2023, Hatteras Sky and Lark Hotels planned three boutique hotels in Asheville, North Carolina, two of which will have Zelda Fitzgerald themes. Zelda Dearest, with 20 rooms, will have the "beauty and optimism" of Zelda's early life. Zelda Salon, named for Gertrude Stein's home in France, will have 35 rooms, with the design based on where the Fitzgeralds stayed in the 1920s.

Online sources

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title: Zelda Fitzgerald


text:
Rich Skrenta

Richard J. Skrenta Jr. (born June 6, 1967) is an American computer programmer and Silicon Valley entrepreneur who created the web search engine blekko.

Early life and education
Skrenta Jr. was born in Pittsburgh on June 6, 1967. In 1982, at age 15, as a high school student at Mt. Lebanon High School, Skrenta wrote the Elk Cloner virus that infected Apple II computers. It is widely believed to have been one of the first large-scale self-spreading personal computer viruses ever created.

In 1989, Skrenta graduated with a B.A. in computer science from Northwestern University.

Career
Between 1989 and 1991, Skrenta worked at Commodore Business Machines with Amiga Unix.

In 1989, Skrenta started working on a multiplayer simulation game. In 1994, it was launched under the name Olympia as a pay-for-play PBEM game by Shadow Island Games.

Between 1991 and 1995, Skrenta worked at Unix System Labs, and from 1996 to 1998 with IP-level encryption at Sun Microsystems. He later left Sun and became one of the founders of DMOZ. He stayed on board after the Netscape acquisition, and continued to work on the directory as well as Netscape Search, AOL Music, and AOL Shopping.

After his stint at AOL, Skrenta went on to cofound Topix LLC, a Web 2.0 company in the news aggregation and forums market.

In 2005, Skrenta and his fellow cofounders sold a 75% share of Topix to a newspaper consortium made up of Tribune, Gannett, and Knight Ridder.

In the late 2000s, Skrenta headed the startup company Blekko Inc, which was an Internet search engine. Blekko received early investment support from Marc Andreessen and began public beta testing on November 1, 2010.

In 2015, IBM acquired both the Blekko company and search engine for their Watson computer system.

Skrenta was involved in the development of VMS Monster, an old MUD for VMS. VMS Monster was part of the inspiration for TinyMUD. He is also known for his role in developing TASS, an ancestor of tin, the popular threaded Usenet newsreader for Unix systems.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Rich Skrenta


text:
Marstrand

Marstrand is a seaside locality situated in Kungälv Municipality, Västra Götaland County, Sweden. It had 1,320 inhabitants in 2010. The town got its name from its location on the island of Marstrand. Despite its small population, for historical reasons Marstrand is often referred to as a city.

The city had free port status, which was declared by King Gustav III, from 1775 to 1794. Religious liberty established by the same sovereign allowed an early Swedish congregation of Jews to be established there in 1775 and one of Scandinavia's first synagogues was set up in Fort Fredriksborg in 1780, making the village a notable site to the history of the Jews in Sweden.

Following the abolishment of the free port status and the decline of herring fishing, Marstrand established itself as a seaside resort in the 19th century.

Important annual sporting events held in Marstrand include the Stena Match Cup Sweden and Marstrand Regatta. Marstrand is known as a playground for celebrities and wealthy Swedish residents alike, who come in the summer for the sea, shopping and the nightlife.

History
Marstrand has held city privileges since 1200. The most striking feature of Marstrand is the 17th-century fortress Carlsten, named for King Charles X of Sweden.

During the last quarter of the 18th century Marstrand had free port status granted by King Gustav III.

In the 1790s, the Jewish inhabitants of Marstrand numbered around 60 individuals at its peak Jewish population time. In 1805, all the Jews, except for one family, had left Marstrand for Gothenburg. Notable families of the Marstrand Jewish community were the Henriques, Delbanco, Warburg, von Reis and Magnus families.

Administratively Marstrand with immediately surrounding islands was a municipality of its own until the local government reform of 1971 when it was merged into Kungälv Municipality.

In 1969, around 200 stateless Polish Jews arrived there.

Sailing
Being an island makes Marstrand popular for sailing and boat races.

Marstrand is the host venue for Match Cup Sweden, part of the World Match Racing Tour. The event draws international sailing teams to Marstrand. DS-37 boats are raced two at a time. Points accrued count towards the World Match Racing Tour and a place in the final event, with the overall winner taking the title ISAF World Match Racing Tour Champion. Match racing is well suited to Marstand. Highlights of the events are broadcast on Eurosport television and via the official World Match Racing Tour website.

title: Marstrand


text:
Frances Scott Fitzgerald

Frances Scott "Scottie" Fitzgerald (October 26, 1921 – June 18, 1986) was an American writer and journalist and the only child of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald. She matriculated from Vassar College and worked for The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and other publications. She became a prominent member of the Democratic Party.

In her later years, Fitzgerald became a critic of biographers' depictions of her parents and their marriage. She particularly objected to biographies that depicted her father as a domineering husband who drove his wife insane. Towards the end of her life, Scottie wrote a final coda about her parents to a biographer: "I have never been able to buy the notion that it was my father's drinking which led her to the sanitarium. Nor do I think she led him to the drinking."

Fitzgerald died from throat cancer at her Montgomery home in 1986, aged 64. She was posthumously inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame in 1992.

Early life and family
Scottie Fitzgerald was born on October 26, 1921, in Saint Paul, Minnesota. As her mother Zelda Fitzgerald emerged from the anesthesia, her husband Scott recorded Zelda saying, "Oh, God, goofo [sic] I'm drunk. Mark Twain. Isn't she smart—she has the hiccups. I hope it's beautiful and a fool—a beautiful little fool." F. Scott Fitzgerald later used some of Zelda's rambling almost verbatim for Daisy Buchanan's dialogue in The Great Gatsby.

Scottie spent her childhood moving from place to place with her parents including time in Paris and Antibes in France, and five years' residence in a beach house her father rented on the edge of Chesapeake Bay not far from Baltimore, Maryland. She attended Calvert School and briefly attended the Bryn Mawr School while her mother Zelda received treatment at Sheppard Pratt Hospital. Regarding her parents' behavior during her childhood, Scottie remarked: "'They were always very circumspect around me. I was unaware of all the drinking that was going on. I was very well taken care of and I was never neglected. I didn't consider it a difficult childhood at all. In fact, it was a wonderful childhood.'" In September 1936, a fifteen-year-old Fitzgerald began attending the Ethel Walker School, a fashionable boarding school in Simsbury, Connecticut. The tuition was $2,200 a year, but her father arranged for a reduction. From this time on, Fitzgerald's agent Harold Ober and his wife Anne Ober became her surrogate parents. The Obers visited her at school, and she stayed with them in Scarsdale during holidays. On September 4, 1938, Anne Ober wrote to Scottie's father F. Scott Fitzgerald about her deep maternal relationship with his daughter: "'I know you think Harold and I spoil her, but so far Scottie trusts me and I think I have at least part of her confidence. It is an important relationship to me and while she may not realize it, I think it is to Scottie too.'"

Soon after, Scottie was expelled for sneaking away from campus in order to hitchhike to Yale to meet a romantic interest. In September 1938, she entered Vassar College. Hoping that she would not repeat his academic failures, her father wrote letters to her urging her to study hard. These letters of advice were later collected as Letters to His Daughter.

Seventeen months before her graduation, her father F. Scott Fitzgerald died of a heart attack due to occlusive coronary arteriosclerosis at 44 years old. On learning of her father's death, Scottie telephoned his mistress Sheilah Graham from Vassar and asked that she not attend the funeral for the sake of social propriety. On her part, Scottie insisted that she always viewed Sheilah Graham with affection: "'I didn't resent her being with him. Why should I? I thought it was marvelous that he had somebody to look after him, somebody whose company he enjoyed. She was immensely loyal and devoted, obviously adored him, and I was naturally happy for him. Without her, I can't imagine how he would have survived Hollywood—Hollywood let him down so.'"

Marriage and career
After her matriculation from Vassar in June 1942, Scottie worked as a publicist for Radio City Music Hall and as a researcher for Time magazine. During World War II, she contributed to the Talk of the Town section of The New Yorker, wrote nightclub reviews, and also published her first piece of fiction there, titled The Stocking Present. She also wrote for a number of other magazines.

In February, 1943, amid World War II, Scottie married Lieutenant Samuel Jackson "Jack" Lanahan in New York. Lanahan was a Princeton University alumnus from Baltimore, Maryland, whom she had begun dating prior to her father's death while she was at Vassar. It was a hasty wartime wedding with Scottie wearing a long white gown that Mrs. Harold Ober—who had been a sort of foster mother to Scottie during her mother Zelda's recurrent institutionalization—bought for her the day before the ceremony. Her mother, Zelda, did not attend the wedding. Shortly after their marriage, Lanahan left Scottie for overseas duty.

After the war, her husband Jack Lanahan became a prominent Washington lawyer, and the couple were popular hosts in Washington society in the 1950s and 1960s. During this period, she wrote and directed musical comedies about the Washington social scene that were performed annually to benefit the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Washington. Her show Onward and Upward with the Arts was considered for a Broadway run by producer David Merrick.

During their marriage, Scottie and Jack had four children: Thomas "Tim" Lanahan (who died by suicide at the age of 27 in 1973); Eleanor Anne Lanahan; Samuel Jackson Lanahan, Jr, and Cecilia Scott Lanahan.

Later life and political activities
In 1953, she joined the staff of The Democratic Digest, published by the Democratic National Committee. She became a writer for Democratic Governor Adlai E. Stevenson when he ran against President Dwight Eisenhower in 1956. That year she became a political columnist for The Northern Virginia Sun. In 1967, she divorced her husband and married Clinton Grover Smith.

In her later years, Fitzgerald criticized biographers' depictions of her parents' marriage. In the wake of Nancy Milford's biography of her mother, partisan scholars of Zelda frequently depicted Scott Fitzgerald as a domineering husband who drove his wife insane. In response to this historical revisionism, Zelda's daughter Scottie Fitzgerald wrote an essay dispelling such inaccurate interpretations. She particularly objected to revisionist depictions of her mother as "the classic 'put down' wife, whose efforts to express her artistic nature were thwarted by a typically male chauvinist husband". In contrast, Scottie insisted: "'My father greatly appreciated and encouraged his wife's unusual talents and ebullient imagination. Not only did he arrange for the first showing of her paintings in New York in 1934 he sat through long hours of rehearsals of her one play, Scandalabra, staged by a Little Theater group in Baltimore; he spent many hours editing the short stories she told to College Humor and to Scribner's Magazine.'"

Towards the end of her life, Scottie wrote a final coda about her parents to a biographer: "I have never been able to buy the notion that it was my father's drinking which led her to the sanitarium. Nor do I think she led him to the drinking."

During this period of her life, Scottie also collaborated with her news reporting colleague Winzola McLendon to research and write the 1970 book, Don't Quote Me: Washington Newswomen & the Power Society.

In 1973, when Fitzgerald was legally separated from husband Grove Smith, she moved from Washington, D.C. to her mother's home town of Montgomery, Alabama. After her relocation to Montgomery, she researched the family's roots and was dismayed to discover her grandfather Anthony D. Sayre, an Alabama state legislator, had introduced a racist bill in 1893 that "deprived the black people of Alabama, and thousands of poor whites, of the right to vote." The purpose of the 1893 Sayre Election Law was to "maintain white supremacy, and to have a ticket selected where only white men will vote." Upon learning of this fact, Scottie felt both embarrassment and guilt and—for the remainder of her life—she devoted herself to voter outreach programs in Alabama.

Final years and death
Several months after Fitzgerald's relocation, she attended a party in Montgomery when she was informed via long-distance telephone call of her son's suicide. She made polite excuses about leaving the party without giving the other guests any indication as to what had happened.

Despite ill-health, Fitzgerald remained active in the state Democratic Party in Alabama, and she worked with Walter Mondale during his campaign trips to Montgomery over the years. During the twelve years that she lived in Montgomery before developing throat cancer, she traveled frequently to visit her three surviving children and grandchildren, none of whom lived near Alabama.

Fitzgerald died from throat cancer at her Montgomery home on June 18, 1986, aged 64. Shortly before she died, she told her three surviving children that she wished she had quit smoking cigarettes years earlier. She is buried next to her parents in Rockville, Maryland.

title: Frances Scott Fitzgerald


text:
Maxwell Perkins

William Maxwell Evarts "Max" Perkins (September 20, 1884 – June 17, 1947) was an American book editor, best remembered for discovering authors Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and Thomas Wolfe.

Early life and education
Perkins was born on September 20, 1884, in New York City, to Elizabeth (Evarts) Perkins, a daughter of William M. Evarts, and Edward Clifford Perkins, a lawyer. He grew up in Plainfield, New Jersey, attended St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire and then graduated from Harvard College in 1907. Although an economics major in college, Perkins also studied under Charles Townsend Copeland, a literature professor who helped prepare Perkins for his career.

Career
After working as a reporter for The New York Times, Perkins joined the publishing house of Charles Scribner's Sons in 1910 as an advertising manager, before becoming an editor. At that time, Scribner's was known for publishing older authors such as John Galsworthy, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. However, Perkins wished to publish younger writers. Unlike most editors, he actively sought out promising new authors; he made his first big find in 1919 when he signed F. Scott Fitzgerald. Initially, no one at Scribner's except Perkins had liked The Romantic Egotist, the working title of Fitzgerald's first novel, and it was rejected. Even so, Perkins worked with Fitzgerald to revise the manuscript until it was accepted by the publishing house.

Its publication as This Side of Paradise (1920) marked the arrival of a new literary generation that would always be associated with Perkins. Fitzgerald's profligacy and alcoholism strained his relationship with Perkins. Nonetheless, Perkins remained Fitzgerald's friend to the end of Fitzgerald's short life, in addition to his editorial relationship with the author, particularly evidenced in The Great Gatsby (1925), which benefited substantially from Perkins' criticism.

It was through Fitzgerald that Perkins met Ernest Hemingway, publishing his first major novel, The Sun Also Rises, in 1926. Perkins fought for it over objections to Hemingway's profanity raised by traditionalists in the firm. The commercial success of Hemingway's next novel, A Farewell to Arms (1929), which topped the best-seller list, silenced colleagues' questions about Perkins' editorial judgment.

The greatest professional challenge Perkins faced was posed by Thomas Wolfe's lack of artistic self-discipline. Wolfe wrote voluminously and was greatly attached to each sentence he wrote. After a tremendous struggle, Perkins induced Wolfe to cut 90,000 words from his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel (1929). His next, Of Time and the River (1935), was the result of a two-year battle during which Wolfe kept writing more and more pages in the face of an ultimately victorious effort by Perkins to hold the line on size. At first grateful to Perkins for discovering and mentoring him, Wolfe later came to resent the popular perception that he owed his success to his editor. Wolfe left Scribner's after numerous fights with Perkins. Despite this, Perkins served as Wolfe's literary executor after his early death in 1938 and was considered by Wolfe to be his closest friend.

Although his reputation as an editor is most closely linked to these three, Perkins worked with many other writers. He was the first to publish J. P. Marquand and Erskine Caldwell. His advice was responsible for the success of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, whose The Yearling (1938) grew out of suggestions made by Perkins. It became a best-seller and won the Pulitzer Prize. Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country (1946) was another Perkins find. His penultimate discovery was James Jones, who approached Perkins in 1945. Perkins persuaded Jones to abandon the autobiographical novel he was working on and launched him on what would become From Here to Eternity (1951). By this time, Perkins' health was failing and he did not live to see its success, nor that of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea (1952), which was dedicated to his memory. Perkins' final discovery was Marguerite Young, who started her mammoth Miss MacIntosh, My Darling in 1947 with his encouragement, signing a contract in 1947 based on her 40-page manuscript. The novel was finally published in 1965.

Perkins was noted for his courtesy and thoughtfulness. He also recognized skilled writing wherever he found it and encouraged writers as few editors did. That Ring Lardner has a reputation today, for example, is because Perkins saw him as more than a syndicated humorist. Perkins believed in Lardner more than the writer did, and despite the failure of several earlier collections he coaxed Lardner into letting him assemble another under the title How To Write Short Stories (1924). The book sold well and, thanks to excellent reviews, established Lardner as a literary figure.

Apart from his roles as coach, friend, and promoter, Perkins was unusual among editors for the close and detailed attention he gave to books, and for what the novelist Vance Bourjaily, another of his discoveries, called his "infallible sense of structure." Although he never pretended to be an artist himself, Perkins could often see where an author ought to go more clearly than the writer did. By combining these different editorial activities into his work, Perkins might be considered to be the first authors' editor.

Scholar Matthew Bruccoli described Perkins as the most widely known literary editor of American literature.

Personal life
In 1910, Perkins married Louise Saunders, also of Plainfield, together they had five daughters. Perkins died on June 17, 1947, in Stamford, Connecticut, from pneumonia.

His home in Windsor, Vermont, had been purchased from John Skinner in the 1820s for $5,000 by William M. Evarts, and had been passed down to Evarts' daughter and Max's mother, Elizabeth Hoar Evarts Perkins. She left the home to family members, including her son Maxwell. The home stayed in the family until 2005, and has been restored and reopened as the Snapdragon Inn. The inn houses the Maxwell Perkins Library, which displays and collects items associated with Maxwell Perkins and his extended family. His house in New Canaan, Connecticut, the Maxwell E. Perkins House, is on the National Register of Historic Places.

His granddaughter Ruth King Porter is a Vermont writer, and one of his grandsons is the Riptide TV series actor Perry King. His granddaughter Jenny King Phillips, a documentary filmmaker and therapist, helped spearhead the restoration of Ernest Hemingway’s home in Cuba. Another grandson, Maxwell E.P. King, is a former editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, president of The Heinz Endowments, chief executive officer of the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children's Media at St. Vincent's College, president and CEO of The Pittsburgh Foundation, and the author of The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers, an authorized biography of the beloved children's television host.

In popular culture
In the 1983 film Cross Creek, exploring his professional relationship with Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Perkins is portrayed by actor Malcolm McDowell.

In the 2016 biographical drama film Genius, based on A. Scott Berg's biography of the man, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, Perkins is portrayed by British actor Colin Firth.

title: Maxwell Perkins


text:
Harold Ober

Harold Ober (1881–1959) was an American literary agent.

In 1907 — two years after graduating from Harvard with a degree in literature — Harold Ober became a literary agent at the Paul R. Reynolds Literary Agency. By 1908 he was representing such authors as Jack London and H. G. Wells. In 1929, he opened his own agency, Harold Ober Associates, — representing authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Agatha Christie, William Faulkner, Philip Wylie, Pearl Buck and Walter D. Edmonds and J. D. Salinger. Although abandoning his contract with the publishers Little, Brown, Inc., Salinger employed and entrusted Ober's agency until his death in 2010. Harold Ober died in 1959.

title: Harold Ober


text:
The Last Tycoon

The Last Tycoon is an unfinished novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. In 1941, it was published posthumously under this title, as prepared by his friend Edmund Wilson, a critic and writer. According to Publishers Weekly, the novel is "generally considered a roman à clef", with its lead character, Monroe Stahr, modeled after film producer Irving Thalberg. The story follows Stahr's rise to power in Hollywood, and his conflicts with rival Pat Brady, a character based on MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer.

It was adapted as a TV play in 1957 and a film in 1976 of the same name, with a screenplay for the motion picture by British dramatist Harold Pinter. Elia Kazan directed the film adaptation; Robert De Niro and Theresa Russell starred.

In 1993, a new version of the novel was published under the title The Love of the Last Tycoon, edited by Matthew Bruccoli, a Fitzgerald scholar. This version was adapted for a stage production that premiered in Los Angeles, California, in 1998. In 2013, HBO announced plans to produce an adaptation. HBO cancelled the project and gave the rights to Sony Pictures, which produced and released the television series on Amazon Studios in 2016.

Plot summary
Set in the 1930s, The Last Tycoon traces the life of Hollywood studio manager Monroe Stahr, clearly based on Irving Thalberg (in charge of production at MGM), whom Fitzgerald had encountered several times.

The novel begins with young Bennington College student Cecilia Brady (first-person narrator), the daughter of influential Hollywood producer Pat Brady, preparing to fly home from the East Coast to Los Angeles. At the airport, she is surprised to meet an old friend of her father, author Wylie White. White is accompanied by a failed producer introduced as Mr. Schwartz. Due to complications during the flight, they made a forced landing in Nashville, Tennessee. The threesome decides on a spontaneous trip to the historic estate of former President Andrew Jackson, but on arrival, the attraction is closed. Wylie then proceeds to flirt shamelessly with Cecilia while Mr. Schwartz is fast asleep. When Schwartz awakens, he informs them that he has changed his mind and will not travel to Los Angeles with them. He asks Wylie to deliver a message to a friend, which he gladly accepts. The next day, Wylie and Cecilia learn that Schwartz committed suicide right after they left Nashville.

Cecilia realizes that the message Schwartz gave to Wylie was in fact for Monroe Stahr, her father's business partner. She has had a crush on Monroe for many years. Cecilia arrives at her father's film studio to pick him up for a birthday party. Due to a minor earthquake, Cecilia, her father, and his companions all end up in Stahr's office. A water pipe bursts and floods the set. Stahr beholds two women desperately clinging to the head of a statue – finding one of them to be the spitting image of his late wife. The day after, Stahr asks his secretary to identify the girls for him. She presents him with a phone number which he immediately uses to arrange a meeting with one of the girls. Unfortunately, it is not the girl he wishes to see; she does not resemble his wife at all. Stahr gives her a ride home, where she insists that he come in and meet her friend (the young Irish-born Kathleen Moore). As soon as Moore opens the front door, Stahr recognizes her to be the woman he had seen the other night.

Kathleen withstands his advances on her and even refuses to tell him her name. It is only when Stahr happens to meet her again at a party that he can convince her to go out and have a cup of coffee with him. He drives her to the building site of his new house in Santa Monica. Kathleen seems reluctant to be with Stahr, but she still ends up having sex with him. A short time afterward, Stahr receives a letter in which Kathleen confesses to having been engaged to another man for quite some time. She has now decided to marry him despite having fallen in love with Stahr.

Stahr asks Cecilia to arrange for a meeting with a suspected communist who wants to organize a labor union within the film studio. Stahr and Cecilia meet the man over supper where Stahr gets drunk and gets involved in a violent confrontation. Cecilia takes care of him and they grow closer. Cecilia's father, however, becomes more and more unhappy with Stahr as a business partner and has wanted to get rid of him for a long while. He could not approve less of his daughter's fancying him. Brady knows of Stahr's continued affair with the now-married Kathleen and tries to blackmail him into leaving the company. As he fails to achieve his goal via blackmail, he does not even shy away from hiring a professional killer. Stahr survives, and, in retaliation, also appoints a hitman to have Brady killed. Unlike Brady's, Stahr's conscience starts to trouble him. But, just as he contemplates calling the execution off, his plane crashes on its way back to New York City. The contract killer finishes his job unhindered and leaves Cecilia both without a father and without a lover – the two men who meant the world to her.

List of characters

 * Monroe Stahr – Hollywood film producer
 * Pat Brady – Stahr's associate, also a film producer
 * Cecilia Brady (Celia) – Brady's daughter
 * Kathleen Moore – Stahr's love interest (during the time of writing, Fitzgerald was living with journalist Sheilah Graham who co-wrote the film script Beloved Infidel which portrayed their relationship whilst Fitzgerald was pursuing his unfinished novel. Fitzgerald states in this film that Kathleen is based on Sheilah.)
 * Minna Davis – Monroe Stahr's late wife
 * Edna – Kathleen Moore's friend
 * Wylie White, Manny Schwartz, Jane Maloney, George Boxley, Martha Dodd, the Tarletons - Writers
 * Marcus – Film producer
 * Broaca, Red Ridingwood – Film directors
 * Joe Reinmund – Film supervisor and Stahr's all-around man
 * Pete Zavras – Cameraman
 * Jaques La Borwitz – Assistant producer
 * Robinson – Stahr's troubleshooter
 * Mike Van Dyke – Gagman
 * Rodriguez, Johnny Swanson, Carole Lombard, Gary Cooper – actors
 * Lee Kapper – Art director
 * Mort Fleishacker – Company's lawyer
 * Joe Popolos – Theatre owner
 * Agge – Prince of Denmark
 * Brimmer – Communist party member
 * Catherine Doolan and Katy – Stahr's secretaries
 * Birdy Peters, Maud, Rosemary Schmiel – Pat Brady's secretaries
 * Bernie – Photographer
 * Doctor Baer – Physician
 *  Malone – Policeman
 * Ned Sollinger – Stahr's office boy
 *  Filipino – Stahr's servant
 * Mr Smith – Stahr's assumed name in chapter one
 *  Unnamed – Chapter one: airplane pilots, stewardresses and a taxi driver. Chapter four: Ridingwood's actress

Publication history
The novel was unfinished and in rough form at the time of Fitzgerald's death at age 44. The literary critic and writer Edmund Wilson, a close friend of Fitzgerald, collected the notes for the novel and edited it for publication. The unfinished novel was published in 1941 as The Last Tycoon, by which name it is best known.

In 1993, another version of the novel was published under the title The Love of the Last Tycoon, as part of the Cambridge edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, a Fitzgerald scholar. Bruccoli reworked the extant seventeen chapters of the thirty-one planned according to his interpretation of the author's notes. At least one reviewer considered Bruccoli's work to be a "remarkable feat of scholarship" and notes that it "restored Fitzgerald's original version and has also restored the narrative's ostensible working title, one that implies that Hollywood is the last American frontier where immigrants and their progeny remake themselves."

Point of view
Fitzgerald wrote the novel in a blend of first person and third person narrations. While the story is ostensibly told by Cecilia, many scenes are narrated in which she is not present. Occasionally a scene will be presented twice, once through Cecilia and once through a third party.

Awards
The revised edition of The Love of The Last Tycoon won the Choice Outstanding Academic Books award of 1995.

Adaptations

 * 1957: John Frankenheimer directed a TV version for Playhouse 90, with Jack Palance as Monroe Stahr.
 * 1976: A film version was adapted for the screen by British playwright Harold Pinter, directed by Elia Kazan (his last film). It was produced by Sam Spiegel and released as The Last Tycoon. It starred Robert De Niro as Monroe Stahr and Theresa Russell as Cecilia Brady, and featured appearances by Robert Mitchum and Jack Nicholson. Pinter later won the Nobel Prize for his dramatic plays.
 * 1998: A stage adaptation of the 1993 edition, by Simon Levy and authorized by the Fitzgerald Estate, opened at The Fountain Theatre in Los Angeles. It received high praise and numerous awards.
 * 2013: A 90-minute audio adaptation by Feelgood Fiction for BBC Radio 4 was adapted and directed by Bill Bryden, starring Aidan Gillen and Jack Shepherd.
 * 2014: Japan's all-female theatre company Takarazuka Revue staged a musical adaptation of The Love of The Last Tycoon for then Flower Troupe top star Tomu Ranju's farewell performance.
 * 2016: On November 19, 2013, HBO announced that it planned a TV series based on the novel with Billy Ray writing the script. On November 7, 2014, Amazon Studios picked up Billy Ray's adaptation after HBO passed it off and announced it would be produced by Sony Pictures Television. On November 23, 2015, actor Matt Bomer was cast as Monroe Stahr, Lily Collins as Cecilia Brady, and it was announced that Ray would write and direct the pilot episode. The pilot was released June 17, 2016. The first season was released on July 28, 2017.  Plans for the second season were cancelled in September 2017.
 * 2016: Simon Levy's stage adaptation, authorized by the Fitzgerald Estate, had its European premiere, opening at the Arts Theatre in London on August 17, 2016. Produced by Ruby In The Dust Theatre with the permission of the author. Directed by Linnie Reedman.

Publication history

 * 1941, as The Last Tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson. current ISBN 0-14-118563-5
 * 1993, The Love of the Last Tycoon, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-40231-X, hardcover
 * 2003, The Love of the Last Tycoon, Charles Scribner's Sons, ISBN 0-02-019985-6, paperback

title: The Last Tycoon


text:
Matthew J. Bruccoli

Matthew Joseph Bruccoli (August 21, 1931 – June 4, 2008) was an American professor of English at the University of South Carolina. He was the preeminent expert on F. Scott Fitzgerald. He also wrote about other writers, notably Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe and John O'Hara, and was editor of the Dictionary of Literary Biography.

Early life and education
Matthew Joseph Bruccoli was born in 1931 in The Bronx, New York to Joseph Bruccoli and Mary Gervasi. He graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1949. He studied at Cornell University, where one of his professors was the noted author Vladimir Nabokov, and at Yale University. On campus, he was a founding member of the fledgling Manuscript Society, graduating in 1953. In 1960, he received a PhD in English literature studies from the University of Virginia, where he was supervised by Fredson Bowers.

Bruccoli's interest in F. Scott Fitzgerald began in 1947 when he heard a radio broadcast of Fitzgerald's short story "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz". That week he tracked down a copy of The Great Gatsby, he told interviewers, "and I have been reading it ever since."

Career
Bruccoli taught at the University of Virginia and the Ohio State University early in his career. He settled at the University of South Carolina, where he earned tenure and taught for four decades. He lived in Columbia, South Carolina, where, according to his New York Times obituary, he "cut a dash on campus, instantly recognizable by his vintage red Mercedes convertible, Brooks Brothers suits, Groucho mustache and bristling crew cut that dated to his Yale days. His untamed Bronx accent also set him apart."

Over the course of his career, Bruccoli wrote more than fifty critical books on F. Scott Fitzgerald and other literary figures. His 1981 biography of Fitzgerald, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, is considered the standard Fitzgerald biography. He has edited many of Fitzgerald's works, from This Side of Paradise to Fitzgerald's unfinished final novel, The Last Tycoon. It had first been published posthumously in 1941. Edited by Bruccoli, it was published in a new version in 1993 as The Love of the Last Tycoon, part of a collection by Cambridge University Press. Bruccoli also edited Zelda Fitzgerald's only novel Save Me the Waltz; she was married to Scott.

While studying Fitzgerald, Bruccoli and his wife Arlyn began to collect all manner of Fitzgerald memorabilia. Bruccoli owned the artist's copy of Celestial Eyes, the cover art by Francis Cugat which appeared on the cover of the first edition, and most modern editions, of The Great Gatsby. In 1969, Bruccoli befriended Frances "Scottie" Fitzgerald, the daughter of the Fitzgeralds. In 1976, Bruccoli and Scottie Fitzgerald Smith published The Romantic Egoists, from the scrapbooks that F. Scott and Zelda had maintained. These had included numerous photographs and book reviews. Later in life, Bruccoli and his wife donated their collection to the Thomas Cooper Library at University of South Carolina. The collection is valued at nearly $2 million.

Bruccoli was general editor of the Pittsburgh Series in Bibliography, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. As part of this series, he produced F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Descriptive Bibliography and, with Richard Layman, Ring W. Lardner: A Descriptive Bibliography (1976). Bruccoli had written a working draft of the Lardner book in the summer of 1973 before giving it "to his then-graduate-research-assistant Layman to work on checking it. Layman displayed so much aptitude for the assignment that a collaboration seemed obligatory." In 1983, Bruccoli published Ross Macdonald / Kenneth Millar: A Descriptive Bibliography in the Pittsburgh Series in Bibliography.

Along with Layman, who became recognized as a Dashiell Hammett scholar, and businessman C. E. Frazer Clark, Jr., Bruccoli launched the Dictionary of Literary Biography. The 400-volume reference work contains biographies of more than 12,000 literary figures from antiquity to modern times.

Personal life
Bruccoli married Arlyn Firkins on October 5, 1957. They had four children: Mary, Joseph, Josephine Owens, and Arlyn Bruccoli.

Death
Bruccoli continued working at the University of South Carolina until being diagnosed with a brain tumor. He died on June 4, 2008.

Selected works
• The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800-1870: The Papers of William Charvat (1968)

• Raymond Chandler. A Checklist (1968)

• Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual (1969-79) editor

• Ernest Hemingway, Cub Reporter: Kansas City Star Stories (1970) editor

• F. Scott Fitzgerald in His Own Time. A Miscellany (1971) editor with Jackson R. Bryer

• John O’Hara. A Checklist (1972)

• F. Scott Fitzgerald. A Descriptive Bibliography (1972)

• Ernest Hemingway’s Apprenticeship: Oak Park, 1916-1917 (1972) editor

• As Ever, Scott-Fitz: Letters Between Scott Fitzgerald and His Literary Agent, Harold Ober 1919-1940 (1972) editor

• Chandler Before Marlowe: Raymond Chandler’s Early Prose and Poetry, 1908-1912 (1973)

• The Chief Glory of Every People: Essays on Classic American Writers (1973) editor

• The Romantic Egoists: A Pictorial Autobiography from the Scrapbooks and Albums of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (1974)

• Reconquest of Mexico: An Amiable Journey in Pursuit of Cortés (1974)

• Ring W. Lardner. A Descriptive Bibliography (1976)

• Scott and Ernest: The Authority of Failure and the Authority of Success (1978)

• Selected Letters of John O’Hara (1978) editor

• John O’Hara. A Descriptive Bibliography (1978)

• James Gould Cozzens: New Acquist of True Experience (1979) editor

• The Price Was High: The Last Uncollected Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1979) editor

• Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1980) editor with Margaret M. Duggan

• Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1981; revised edition 2002)

• James Cozzens. A Descriptive Bibliography (1981)

• James Gould Cozzens: A Life Apart (1983)

• Ross Macdonald (1984)

• New Essays on the Great Gatsby (1985) editor

• Nelson Algren. A Descriptive Bibliography (1985)

• New Essays on The Great Gatsby (1985) editor

• The Fortunes of Mitchell Kennerley, Bookman (1986)

• The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1989) editor

• Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters 1940-1977 (1989) editor

• James Dickey. A Bibliography (1990) editor with Judith S. Baughman

• The Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald (1991) editor

• The Great Gatsby: The Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1991) editor

• Ring Around the Bases: The Complete Baseball Stories of Ring Lardner (1992) editor

• The Love of the Last Tycoon. A Western: The Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1993) editor

• F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters (1994) editor with Judith S. Baughman

• Modern Classic Writers: Essential Bibliography of American Fiction (1994) editor with Judith S. Baughman

• Modern African American Writers: Essential Bibliography of American Fiction (1994) editor with Judith S. Baughman

• Fitzgerald and Hemingway. A Dangerous Friendship (1994)

• F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship (1996) editor with Judith S. Baughman

• The Only Thing That Counts: The Ernest Hemingway-Maxwell Perkins Correspondence 1925-1947 (1996) editor

• Classes on F. Scott Fitzgerald (2001)

• Conversations With F. Scott Fitzgerald (2003)

• The Sons of Maxwell Perkins: Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and their Editor (2004) editor with Judith S. Baughman

• The Matthew J. and Arlyn Bruccoli Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald at the University of South Carolina. An Illustrated Catalogue (2004)

• F. Scott Fitzgerald in the Marketplace: The Auction and Dealer Catalogues, 1935-2006 (2009) posthumous, editor with Judith S. Baughman

• On Books and Writers: Selected Essays (2010) posthumous, with John C. Unrue (ed.)

title: Matthew J. Bruccoli