The Little-Known Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald

By Alex J. Coyne | On March 6, 2025 | Comments (0)

Zelda Fitzgerald was an American author, artist, and socialite. Although she is best remembered as the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald, she was a talented writer and artist in her own right, which caused the couple a great deal of conflict.

Zelda wrote one novel (Save Me the Waltz) and an unstaged play, Scandalabra. What is less known is that she wrote various articles for periodicals, including College Humor, Harper’s Bazaar, and the New York Tribune. Here, we’ll take a closer look at five of these little-known features.

Zelda Fitzgerald’s life in brief

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald (1900 – 1948) was born into to an affluent family in Montgomery, Alabama. In 1920, she married F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940), and the couple moved to New York City, where they became known for their hard-drinking and party-centric lifestyle. Zelda became known as a flapper—the word coined for free-spirited young women living on their own terms.

Zelda’s work wasn’t successful in her lifetime. Save Me the Waltz sold poorly, earning only about $120 in royalties, according to the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society. In comparison, F. Scott Fitzgerald earned approximately $17,055 for various writings in the 1920s.

The Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald compiles most of Zelda’s work in one volume. It includes her novel and play. Zelda was also a visual artist, though her few gallery exhibitions weren’t successful. Reproductions of her work can be seen here.

The Fitzgerald’s marriage eventually fell apart, and Zelda was institutionalized for various mental illnesses, including depression and possible schizophrenia. Zelda began work on a second novel, Caesar’s Things, after Scott’s death, but it remained unfinished due to her various challenges. Repeated electroshock treatments, among others, greatly affected her quality of life and memory.

While sedated, Zelda died at Highville Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina in an arson fire. She was inducted into the Alabama Women’s Hall of Fame in 1992, and in recent times her work has been reconsidered, especially for her honest, sometimes biting commentary about being a woman in the early decades of the twentieth century.

5 Published Featurs by Zelda Fitzgerald

Zelda sold her first article to Metropolitan Magazine in 1922, commenting on the phenomenon of 1920s flapper culture—essentially, outspoken women who rejected cultural norms and repressive attitudes of the time.

Her writings were sometimes credited alongside her husband, though it’s now believed she did most of the writing. Scott is likely to have taken some passages from her diaries to use in his own work.

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“Eulogy on the Flapper” (Metropolitan Magazine, June 1922)

Zelda’s article, “Eulogy on the Flapper” (1922, Metropolitan Magazine), delved into the popular subculture. comments on what it was like to be an influential, outspoken woman of the time.

The piece starts with Zelda’s disillusionment about popular culture and party life, expressing her growing dissatisfaction with life, only two years into her marriage.

“The Flapper is deceased. Her outer accoutrements have been bequeathed to several hundred girls’ schools throughout the country, to several thousand big-town shopgirls, always imitative of the several hundred girls’ schools, and to several million small-town belles always imitative of the big-town shopgirls via the ‘novelty stores’ of their respective small towns.”

The piece continues, describing the idealistic enthusiasm with which young women opposed conservative 1920s culture:

“’Out with inhibitions,’ gleefully shouts the Flapper, and elopes with the Arrow-collar boy that she had been thinking, for a week or two, might make a charming breakfast companion.”

Zelda ends “Eulogy on the Flapper” with irony, implying that flapper culture wasn’t dead but deliberately suppressed — instead of being naïve, as they were commonly perceived, she writes that flappers teach young women to think for themselves:

“And yet the strongest cry against Flapperdom is that it is making the youth of the country cynical. It is making them intelligent and teaching them to capitalize their natural resources and get their money’s worth. They are merely applying business methods to being young.”

“Friend Husband’s Latest” (New York Tribune, April 1922)

Zelda’s influence on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work is unmistakable. According to multiple sources, Zelda was the inspiration for several characters in his novels and stories—including Rosalind in his debut novel This Side of Paradise.

The feature Friend Husband’s Latest is a review of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Beautiful and Damned, from Zelda’s perspective. She begins with a simple, sarcastic description:

“I note on the table beside my bed this morning a new book with an orange jacket entitled The Beautiful and Damned. It is a strange book, which has for me an uncanny fascination. It has been lying on that table for two years. I have been asked to analyze it carefully in the light of my brilliant critical insight, my tremendous erudition, and my vast impressive partiality. Here I go!”

According to this feature, Scott had appropriated several passages from Zelda’s diaries and inserted them into the book—presumably without her permission.

“Mr. Fitzgerald—I believe that is how he spells his name—seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.”

Some modern scholars believe that Zelda’s co-written pieces were entirely her own, though many were credited to both she and Scott. Similarities in their writing styles have also made some suspect that Scott had plagiarized from her work more than once.

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“Looking Back Eight Years” (College Humor, June 1928)

“Looking Back Eight Years” presents a disillusioned take on Zelda’s life over an eight-year period. In Zelda’s words, quoted from the book Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise below:

“It is not altogether the prosperity of the country and the consequent softness of life which have made them unstable… It is a great emotional disappointment resulting from the fact that life moved in poetic gestures when they were younger and has now settled back into buffoonery…”

At this point, Zelda may have looked back to the optimism of her youth and compared it with her mounting dissatisfaction:

“Sensitive young people are haunted and harassed by a sense of unfulfilled destiny.”

“Who Can Fall in Love After Thirty” (College Humor, October 1928)

“Who Can Fall in Love After Thirty” explored Zelda’s thoughts on love, passion, and how one’s perception might change with age.

“The one passion that does not exist for the men of forty is the bombastic, reckless, uncalculated, uncompromising one mostly responsible for adolescent marriages. Their horizon has broadened, their energies are spread over a wider field, they have learned to discipline and weigh their impulses toward adventure.”

She implies further dissatisfaction with, and seeking different things from, a relationship after age thirty. When she wrote this piece, her relationship with Scott was extremely strained, and compared it with a wine that’s costly and intoxicating.

“It seems to us that at thirty, the haze of youth having lifted a little, emotions are stronger for their clarity, more definite for the fact that by then they have a category, a place where they belong — for the same reasons that wine in a bottle with a year is better than wine on tap; and if it is more costly and intoxicating, well, maybe that’s why people drink less of it!”

She continued writing for College Humor until 1931, when her last piece, “Poor Working Girl,” was published.

“The Changing of Park Avenue” (Harper’s Bazaar, January 1928)

“The Changing of Park Avenue” described one of New York City’s most prestigious locations at the height of the 1920s Jazz Age.

“Beginning in the pool of glass that covers the Grand Central tracks, Park Avenue flows quietly and smoothly up Manhattan. Windows and prim greenery and tall, graceful, white facades rise up from either side of the asphalt stream, while in the center floats, impermanently, a thin series of water-color squares of grass—suggesting the Queen’s Croquet Ground in Alice in Wonderland.”

She praises its beauty but also criticizes its opulence:

“There has never been a faded orchid on Park Avenue. And yet this is a masculine avenue. An avenue that has learned its attraction from men—subdued and subtle and solid and sophisticated in its understanding that avenues and squares should be a fitting and sympathetic background for the promenades of men.”

Zelda’s criticism of Park Avenue can also be viewed as being part of a larger critique aimed at a dissolute society as a whole:

“There is a lightness about these mornings. Nobody has ever asked a geographical question on Park Avenue. It is not ‘the way’ to anywhere. It exists, apparently, solely because millionaires have decided that life on the grand scale in a small space is only possible with as tranquil and orderly a background as this long, blond, immaculate route presents.”

Zelda frequently drew from her own life and experiences, including the 1931 story “Poor Working Girl ” (College Humor) that was inspired by her life with Scott in New York.

Perhaps expressing her own thoughts about criticism, the story ends with the line: ”[…] perhaps Eloise wasn’t destined for Broadway after all.”

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Contributed by Alex J. Coyne, a journalist, author, and proofreader. He has written for a variety of publications and websites, with a radar calibrated for gothic, gonzo and the weird. His features, posts, articles and interviews have been published in People Magazine, ATKV Taalgenoot, LitNet, The Citizen, Funds for Writers, and The South African, among other publications.

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