Synopses & Reviews
Linda Wagner-Martin has created a new kind of biography of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald: Zelda's story from her perspective, instead of her famous husband's. This is the first biography to tell her entire life story, describing what it meant to be born in 1900, and then to be a "New Woman" in Montgomery, Alabama. Featuring for the first time information from the newly available archives at Princeton, Wagner-Martin vividly illustrates Zelda's psychiatric landscape. Detailed discussions of the roots of alcoholism and infidelity are juxtaposed with the first comprehensive critiques of Zelda's diverse artistic accomplishments as a dancer, short story writer, essayist and novelist. This is an evocative portrayal of a talented woman's professional and emotional conflicts, a story with as much relevance today as it had half a century ago.
Synopsis
Linda Wagner-Martin's Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald is a twenty-first century story. Using cultural and gender studies as contexts, Wagner-Martin brings new information to the story of the Alabama judge's daughter who, at seventeen, met her husband-to-be, Scott Fitzgerald. Swept away from her stable home life into Jazz Age New York and Paris, Zelda eventually learned to be a writer and a painter; and she came close to being a ballerina. An evocative portrayal of a talented woman's professional and emotional conflicts, this study contains extensive notes and new photographs.
Synopsis
A cultural biography which focuses on Zelda Fitzgerald the woman, not just her tempestuous marriage and eventual mental institutionalization.
Synopsis
The first biography of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald to tell her entire life story from her perspective
About the Author
LINDA WAGNER-MARTIN is the Frank Borden Hanes Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina. She is the author of more than forty books on American writers and genres - among them Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Anne Sexton, Robert Frost, Denise Levertov, John Dos Passos, and Sylvia Plath. The recipient of awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Humanities, and others, she has been a Bunting Institute fellow and the President of the Hemingway Foundation. Among recent books are: William Faulkner: Six Decades of Criticism, A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway, a biography of Gertrude Stein, and her co-edited encyclopaedia, The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States. She has also written Sylvia Plath, A Biography (1988) and Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life (the second edition of which was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2003)..
Table of Contents
Preface * Zelda Sayre, Belle * The Courtship * Celebrity Couple * Travels * Europe Once More * Hollywood and Ellerslie * Zelda as Artist: Writer and Dancer * The Crack-Up, 1930 * On the Way to Being Cured * The Phipps Clinic and Baltimore * Zelda as Patient * The Crack-Up, 1936 * Endings * Notes * Bibliography * Index