There has been a lot written about Zelda Fitzgerald in an effort to give her back her identity, and rightly so. She was the original wild child, in her words an “extravagant,” whose reckless inhibition made her a superstar. Even today, over a hundred years after her birth, her name, image, and legacy are so iconic that it is easy to forget how incredibly short was her reign, and how long was her downfall that left her wholly forgotten by the time of her death.

“Nothing could have survived our life.”   Zelda

She was beautiful, witty, and a world class exhibitionist married to one of the great writers ever, F. Scott Fitzgerald, who based a substantial amount of his work on his observations of her. Their marriage was intense and toxic, and while he had a hand in her catastrophic decline, there can be little doubt that there was something in her that would have gone wrong even if he had never shown up. It would have just been a different kind of wrong.

“She probably thought terribly dangerous secret thoughts.”   Sara Murphy

The teenage belle had an air of both well-bred gentility and a total of lack of concern for [read more]