Having just seen the marvelous Woody Allen movie Midnight in Paris, and then rereading The Great Gatsby while on vacation in the Adirondacks, I decided to blog today about the celebrated writer from St. Paul, Minnesota, who both coined and embodied the famous epochal phrase "the Jazz Age." F. Scott Fitzgerald was named for Francis Scott Key (his third cousin twice removed) and married to Zelda Sayre, whom he dubbed "the first American Flapper." While the couple was doted on by an adoring press and regarded as the toast of the Roaring Twenties, Scott's alcoholism and Zelda's mental illness combined to produce a fitful marriage. Their relationship is fictionally depicted in Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night as well as in Zelda's sole novel, Save Me the Waltz. There were twenty cases of Fitgerald* in OhioLINK this morning and 225 in WorldCat.
(Portrait of F. Scott Fitzgerald and wife Zelda, taken at Dellwood, September 1921, shortly before the birth of their daughter Scottie, courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society and Wikimedia Commons.)
Carol Reid
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