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Nancy Milford
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Zelda: A Biography Kindle Edition

by Nancy Milford (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
3.9 3.9 out of 5 stars 714 ratings
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This New York Times–bestselling biography details the tortured, enigmatic life of the novelist, artist, socialite, and wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Zelda Sayre started out as a Southern beauty, became an international wonder, and died by fire in a madhouse. With her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, she moved in a golden aura of excitement, romance, and promise. The epitome of the Jazz Age, they rode the crest of the era to its collapse and their own.

As a result of years of exhaustive research, Nancy Milford brings alive the tormented, elusive personality of Zelda and clarifies as never before her relationship with Scott Fitzgerald. Zelda traces the inner disintegration of a gifted, despairing woman, torn by the clash between her husband’s career and her own talent.

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award
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  1. Print length
    466 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publisher
    Harper Perennial
  5. Publication date
    April 30, 2013
  6. File size
    4083 KB
  7. Page Flip
    Enabled
  8. Word Wise
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  9. Enhanced typesetting
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Nancy Milford has sought to make us see Zelda as a separate person and, by that, the Fitzgeralds through a woman’s eyes . . . . A superb portrait.” — Washington Post Book World

“Profound, overwhelmingly moving…a richly complex love story.” — New York Times

“Milford’s fine book is itself a work of art.” — Wall Street Journal

From the Back Cover

Zelda Sayre began as a Southern beauty, became an international wonder, and died by fire in a madhouse. With her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, she moved in a golden aura of excitement, romance, and promise. The epitome of the Jazz Age, together they rode the crest of the era: to its collapse and their own.

From years of exhaustive research, Nancy Milford brings alive the tormented, elusive personality of Zelda and clarifies as never before her relationship with` Scott Fitzgerald. Zelda traces the inner disintegration of a gifted, despairing woman, torn by the clash between her husband's career and her own talent.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00C2BZGXQ
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper Perennial; Modern Classics ed. edition (April 30, 2013)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 30, 2013
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 4083 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 466 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.9 3.9 out of 5 stars 714 ratings

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  1. Nancy Milford

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Customer reviews

3.9 out of 5 stars
3.9 out of 5
714 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Abstract Zebra
5.0 out of 5 stars gorgeous in detail, sensitive and poignant
Reviewed in the United States on January 26, 2024
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Zelda details the fascinating life of Zelda Sayre, the young Southern woman who became the epitome of the jazz age, the flapper, and the muse, and wife of
F Scott Fitzgerald, one of the greatest American writers of all time.

Nancy Milford is an incredible author and clearly spent thousands of hours and years researching and interviewing those connected with Zelda and Scott, their daughter Scottie and their family and it clearly shows - the Jazz age lives and breathes again in her writing of their lives.

The biography chronicles not only the life of Zelda but also those sharing her life, particularly her famous husband Scott and the struggles of their marriage.

Milford thoughtfully chronicles Zelda’s golden youth and obvious beauty, her meeting Scott, their courtship and his growing importance in her life, their eventual marriage, their joys, their jealousies, their drunkenness and excesses, his first success as a writer and the impact upon them as a couple as well as Zelda’s critical role as a muse as well as Zelda’s own search for a personal role as an artist, and Zelda’s slow descent into madness, their financial struggles, contrasting against the cosmopolitan backdrop of glittering and ever changing America or European cityscapes.

This is a mesmerizing, exquisitely and sensitively written biography and an absolutely worthwhile read.
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Kristine
4.0 out of 5 stars Well-researched, Thorough, and Exhausting (in a good way) Read
Reviewed in the United States on December 28, 2012
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This is quite the well-researched, thorough, and exhausting read (in a good way)! The book is organized in such a way as to take the reader through each major part of Zelda's life. [I originally wanted to learn more after reading about Zelda in "Hemmingway's Wives" by Paula McLain - another interesting read.] The only thing missing was a better picture of Zelda's overall condition (Was it really, truly schizophrenia?). The only slow - or down - part of the book is the reliance on reading Zelda's later writings and interpreting them to her past and current situation. Those sections were entirely too long for what I got out of them. That said, this book gave me a great overview of Zelda's life and what it was like to live and run with the literary types back in the day. In a word? Exhausting! I would not have enjoyed the drinking, smoking, and overall pretentiousness that seemed to go along with being a writer - back then. I also was surprised at how much credit Scott received for Zelda's writing - and how much he appropriated from her letters - and her life - into his own writing. This was a complicated love story that is overshadowed by illness, competitive, and insecurity; but, well worth the read!
13 people found this helpful
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Whitney Moore
3.0 out of 5 stars There But For Fortune
Reviewed in the United States on May 30, 2022
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Reading Zelda by Nancy Milford “flashbacked” me to catch the scent of something I had started to follow way back in our newlywed years more than fifty years ago, back in the days when we were reading authors like Hemingway and Fitzgerald who, with their wives and lives, we thought were GLAM – especially Zelda and Scott who were the exact opposite of the frumpy-dumpy-grumpy “grown-ups” with whom we had grown up. Except we hadn’t grown up and didn’t want to!

Not us. We were revilers of the duty-bound and the disappointed, like Peter Pan singing, “I Won’t Grow Up” with the Lost Boys. Our goal was to play as hard as we worked and to keep the torrid burning. Translation: we were aiming straight for the kinds of trouble that attended the Lost Generation as they sipped absinthe in Paris. Like them, we were on track to meet our share of demons which, eventually, we did.

In between, I met someone who had been employed at the psychiatric hospital where Zelda had been a patient. She knew Zelda! And said there was nothing glamorous about her by then. Gone were her days of wild and wonderful, and then, she died when Highland Hospital burned down to the ground, killing nine women, six of them trapped on the top floor. Zelda died with them. When visiting Asheville recently, we took a trolley tour that stopped at the property where Highland Hospital had once stood. Now, only a few stone steps remain. That was the closest I ever got to Zelda, until Milford’s biography started raising the forgotten ways I had resonated with Zelda way back when:

• Like Zelda, I had chafed against the emotional restraint of my family and embraced the idea that anything done moderately was better left undone. Milford says that “Zelda intended to avoid at all costs her vision of the legion of unhappy women, saddled with domesticity, weary and yet resigned to it.” Me, too.

• Then she quoted a reporter who had once described Scott as “towering over his petite wife” which was pretty much us, too.

• A close friend of the Fitzgerald once described Scott as “nasty when he was drunk, but sober he was a charming man, very good looking, you know, beautiful, almost. But they both drank a lot—we all did, but they were excessive….”

I just kept saying “me too” as I read this book. There were so many intersections with Zelda that I felt like an echo of her, who had lived and died long before I ever showed up on earth. Apparently, she and Scott started out with “a jaunty confidence in life and in each other.” Once upon a time, that was us, too, back when we were so flagrantly determined to be like them: “a couple of nuts.”

Yet unlike them, we were pulled out of the swamp into which we had foolishly followed Alcohol. Our rescuers: a few of the Friends of Bill W. Reading this book was like reading the BEFORE to our AFTER, and it generated an increased dose of appreciation that what had happened to them did not end up happening to us. I thought the author captured it when she described the Fitzgeralds as “dazzling youngsters, charmingly self-promoting, with a cache of youth and stamina to rescue them.” But then, life happened, and issues, and illness about which Milford poignantly says, “What Zelda needed was peace, calm, and reassurance of herself at every point of uncertainty. Scott could not give what he did not have.”

All that could have become true for us and nearly has, more than once. For Zelda, marriage had involved a lot of fighting dirty, but she danced anyway -- plus God. And so, I say again: me, too, except for me, it has been about singing -- plus God. And now my goal is simply this: to not squelch the song.
18 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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K
5.0 out of 5 stars An amazing lady
Reviewed in Canada on February 28, 2019
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Great story
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Sara Zelda
4.0 out of 5 stars Il miglior libro su Zelda
Reviewed in Italy on March 8, 2015
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Un’opera monumentale, rintracciabile al momento solo in lingua originale. Completo di una piccola galleria fotografica, il voluminoso tomo testimonia anni di appassionata ricerca, non solo sulla nostra, ma anche sul contesto storico, rivelandosi una lettura davvero preziosa.
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Lotte Marotis
3.0 out of 5 stars Too small print
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 3, 2014
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The book is fine but the size of the print is much too small and makes it tiresome to read
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Robert Knuckle
4.0 out of 5 stars Very good substance and style.
Reviewed in Canada on April 14, 2013
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This book is very informative and well-written. It was very well researched and easy to read. I learned a lot about Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald. .
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Seriousreader
2.0 out of 5 stars A censored biography.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 13, 2014
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Disappointing, because although this was a best seller in the 1970s, it was not allowed to publish much of the material found in a later biography, 'Zelda Fitzgerald' by Sally Cline, 2002. This (pressure from the family in 1970) presents Zelda as a friendless sick person and this was definitely not true.
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