Zelda Fitzgerald: Tragedy Follows Plagiarism
After moving from place to place and even a short stay in France, their marriage and her mental health had taken a toll on Zelda Fitzgerald. From the mid-1930s, Zelda spent the rest of her life in various stages of mental distress. Some of the paintings that she had created over the previous years, in and out of sanatoriums, were exhibited in 1934. But much to her dismay, she found a cold reception to her art. The New Yorker described them merely as “Paintings by the almost mythical Zelda Fitzgerald; with whatever emotional overtones or associations may remain from the so-called Jazz Age.”
Today, experts speculate on what mental illness Zelda suffered from. At first, her doctors suggested that Zelda was schizophrenic. But later, she seemed to resist that diagnosis or the notion that her illness entailed an organic psychosis: ”I would rather have Zelda a sane mystic than a mad realist. . . .”In 1936, Zelda entered Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, and in 1937 Scott moved to Hollywood to become a scriptwriter. He died of a heart attack there three years later at the age of 44. Zelda continued to paint and started a second novel, Caesar’s Things, but perished in a fire at Highland Hospital in 1948 before she could finish it. She never attained the creative success she eagerly sought, but she and Scott inspired numerous biographies, novels, movies, and TV series.