Nancy Milford - biography - 1983 - p. 84    

This biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, F. Scott’s wife, portrays a tortured woman struggling to negotiate her own talent with her husband’s career in the midst of the Jazz Age. Zelda, who grew up a Southern belle, suffered from schizophrenia and was eventually institutionalized; her state of mind was not helped by her husband’s alcoholism and proprietary attitude toward many of their shared experiences, which Zelda often sought to use as material for her writing. It is also widely believed that Scott appropriated and took credit for much of her work.

Nancy Milford is a writer and academic. She is a Distinguished Lecturer at Hunter College in New York City and the Executive Director at the CUNY Graduate Center’s Leon Levy Center for Biography.

Key elements:  alcoholism, American South, marriage, mental illness