The only remaining footage of from 1926’s ‘Great Gatsby’ movie. Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald allegedly walked out on the film, later calling it “ROTTEN and awful and terrible.”
Zelda and Scott’s Creative Communion:
“According to a letter F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, just before publication of THE GREAT GATSBY, Scott didn’t fully know what Jay Gatsby looked like until his wife, Zelda, drew Gatsby so many times she’d exhausted her fingers. It was a passing detail in a long series of letters to Perkins, but upon close examination, it touched on the degree of the mania of creation Zelda shared with Scott throughout his career, including the time he wrote THE GREAT GATSBY.”
Fitzgerald family photo! This much circulated photo finally has proper photo credits. It was taken by the Tidewater photo service in Virginia Beach at the Cavalier Hotel swimming pool in July of 1927 and first published in the Norfolk Ledger Dispatch on July 18, 1927.
The Fitzgeralds’ passports
An artist spirals downward
The WSJ runs a very nice write-up of our latest addition to the Fitzgerald bookshelf, A Short Autobiography, chronicling Fitzgerald’s life from 1920-1940.
“Part of this collection’s pleasure derives from watching a young man inch toward middle age, though this is less a tale of an artist coming into his own than a man spiraling out of it.”
Zelda Fitzgerald, American writer, dancer and Jazz-age belle - died this day in 1948, aged 47, caught in a fire in the sanatorium she had committed herself to for shock therapy…
Zelda is now buried in the same grave as her estranged husband F. Scott Fitzgerald. They share an epitaph that quotes the end of his novel, The Great Gatsby:
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Zelda herself said:
Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much a heart can hold.
Photo of Zelda, the Flapper - 1924
Oh, Zelda.
