F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald: A Literature of Romance and an Age of Jazz
F. Scott Fitzgerald is well known as the voice of the jazz age, and his wife Zelda was the quintessential flapper. While Scott’s writing has long been lauded, Zelda’s writing and art are only now beginning to be appreciated fully. Research has shown that Zelda’s own writing informed Scott’s from the beginning of his career, even as his own writing offered him the path to claim her hand. The Fitzgeralds’ adult lives eerily reflected two drastically different decades—where their star had beamed with the Roaring 1920s, they both descended into poor physical and mental health during the Great Depression of the 1930s. This lecture will trace the lives and love of these two larger-than-life figures, focusing especially on the way their relationship drove and furnished material for their writing and art.