The Legend of Zelda Fitzgerald Quiz

Answer: Ballet

Zelda took ballet lessons as she grew up. Her performances at ballet recitals gathered positive attention, which came into contrast with the negative reputation her social life had earned. Zelda also engaged in swimming and diving, and she often went to dances.

Answer: False

Zelda was born on July 24, 1900 in Montgomery, Alabama, the youngest of her siblings. Her father was Anthony Sayre, a judge of the Supreme Court of Alabama, and her mother was Minerva 'Minnie' Machen. Urged by her mother's encouragement and the protection her family's reputation provided, Zelda often challenged social etiquette and sought attention.

She spent a lot of time with boys and, among other things, wore a flesh-colored swimsuit so that she would appear nude when swimming.

Answer: 1918

As an adolescent, Zelda went to dances where soldiers from nearby camps would gather to meet the local girls. In one of the dances, Zelda met F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was stationed at Camp Sheridan at the time. Soon afterwards he began courting her, and she became his muse for the character of Rosalind Connage in Scott's book "This Side of Paradise".

In March 1920, "This Side of Paradise" was published and the two of them became engaged. They got married in New York on April 3, 1920, and urged by the success of Scott's novel, they became celebrities very soon.

Answer: The first American flapper

The Fitzgeralds were famous in New York, and their wild behavior only contributed to that. They jumped into the Union Square fountain, they rode on top of a taxi and passed out at parties. Scott called Zelda "the first American flapper" (flappers were young women in the 1920s who behaved and dressed unconventionally) and their friend Ring Lardner said of them that "Mr. Fitzgerald is a novelist and Mrs. Fitzgerald is a novelty".

Answer: That Scott used passages from Zelda's missing diary in the book

Zelda was Scott's muse, and he often used her and events from their tumultuous marriage as a source of inspiration for his novels. In her review of "The Beautiful and Damned", Zelda wrote that "I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and, also, scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar".

Answer: Zelda and Scott did not like Paris as much as New York.

Soon after moving to Paris, Scott was writing "The Great Gatsby". At that time, Zelda developed feelings for a French pilot called Edouard Jozan and a few weeks later she asked for a divorce. Scott reacted by locking Zelda in their house until she withdrew her request, but his already insecure nature led him to lose faith in Zelda's fidelity. The next year, Scott met and befriended Ernest Hemingway. Zelda and Hemingway disliked each other, and she described him as phony, while he considered her crazy. In the end, Zelda accused Scott of having an affair with Hemingway, which he took as an insult to his masculinity.

Meanwhile, Zelda had grown tired of living in her husband's shadow, and wanted to reach success based on her own talent. She took up painting initially and started training intensely again in ballet at age 27, but Scott disregarded her attempts. The intense ballet training put a strain on Zelda both physically and mentally without yielding the results she wanted, because she had taken it up again at a late age. Zelda eventually turned to other forms of art.

Answer: Save Me the Waltz

In 1932, while she was being treated at the Johns Hopkins University's Phipps Clinic, Zelda wrote the novel "Save Me the Waltz". The book was a partly autobiographical recounting of her marriage to F. Scott Fitzgerald and caused great tension between the two of them. Scott accused Zelda of stealing elements from the plot of his own book "Tender Is the Night". "Save Me the Waltz" was eventually published in October 1932, but it didn't fare well with the critics at the time. The book also sold only a little more than a thousand copies, with Zelda's royalties amounting to $120. The failure of her book and Scott's disparaging comments about her as a writer crushed Zelda, causing her to turn away from writing.

As for the wrong choices, "Caesar's Things" is a novel by Zelda that was left unfinished and unpublished, "Scandalabra" is a play written by Zelda after "Save Me the Waltz", and "The Vegetable" is a play written by Scott before they left for Paris. Neither play was successful.

Answer: She was admitted to a sanatorium and diagnosed schizophrenic.

In April 1930, Zelda was admitted to a sanatorium in France where she was diagnosed with schizophrenia (the precision of her diagnosis was disputed in the future). She was later taken to a clinic in Switzerland, from where she was released in September 1931.

She and Scott returned to her hometown, Montgomery, because her father was dying. Scott left for Hollywood and soon afterwards Zelda's father died. She was admitted to Johns Hopkins in February 1932 and she spent several of her remaining years in hospitals and clinics.

Answer: True

In 1938, while Zelda was being treated at a hospital, she and Scott took a trip to Cuba. The trip was a complete disaster, with Scott being beaten up during a fight, returning to the US completely intoxicated and ending up hospitalized. That was the last time they saw each other. They stayed in touch through correspondence until his death from a heart attack on December 21, 1940.

Answer: In a fire

During her final years, Zelda often stayed at the Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. On March 10, 1948, a fire broke out and spread through the hospital, causing Zelda's and eight other women's deaths. The novel she was writing at the time, "Caesar's Things", was left unfinished. She was buried with her husband in Rockville, Maryland.