This Side of Paradise

Anouck Lepere Plays Zelda Fitzgerald by Carter Smith for W

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was an American novelist and the wife of writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. She was an icon of the 1920s—dubbed by her husband “the first American Flapper”. After the success of his first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), the Fitzgeralds became celebrities. The newspapers of New York saw them as embodiments of the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties: young, seemingly wealthy, beautiful, and energetic.

Even as a child her audacious behavior was the subject of gossip. Shortly after finishing high school, she met F. Scott Fitzgerald at a dance. A whirlwind courtship ensued. Though he had professed his infatuation, she continued seeing other men. Despite fights and a prolonged break-up, they married in 1920, and spent the early part of the decade as literary celebrities in New York.  While Scott received acclaim for The Great Gatsby and his short stories, their marriage was a tangle of jealousy, resentment and acrimony. Scott used their relationship as material in his novels, even lifting snippets from Zelda’s diary and assigning them to his fictional heroines. Seeking an artistic identity of her own, Zelda wrote magazine articles and short stories, and at 27 became obsessed with a career as a ballerina, practicing to exhaustion.

The strain of her tempestuous marriage, Scott’s increasing alcoholism, and her growing instability presaged Zelda’s admittance to the Sheppard Pratt sanatorium in 1930. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise describes life at Princeton among the glittering, bored, and disillusioned—the post–World War I “lost generation.” Published in 1920, when he was just twenty-three, the novel was an overnight success and shot Fitzgerald to instant stardom as dauphin of the Jazz Age.

Taking its title from a line of the Rupert Brooke poem Tiare Tahiti, the book examines the lives and morality of post-World War I youth. Its protagonist, Amory Blaine, is an attractive Princeton University student who dabbles in literature and has the book’s theme of love warped by greed and status-seeking.

In the summer of 1919, 22-year-old Fitzgerald broke up with the girl he had been courting, Zelda Sayre. After being drunk for much of the summer he returned to St. Paul, Minnesota, where his family lived, to complete the novel, hoping that if he became a successful novelist he could win Zelda back. While at Princeton, Fitzgerald had written an unpublished novel called The Romantic Egotist and ultimately 80 pages of the typescript of this earlier work ended up in This Side of Paradise.

On September 4, 1919, Fitzgerald gave the manuscript to a friend to deliver to Maxwell Perkins, an editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons in New York. The book was nearly rejected by the editors at Scribners, but Perkins insisted, and on September 16 it was officially accepted. Fitzgerald begged for early publication—convinced that he would become a celebrity and impress Zelda—but was told that the novel would have to wait until the spring. Nevertheless, upon the acceptance of his novel for publication he went and visited Zelda and they resumed their courtship. His success imminent, she agreed to marry him.

This Side of Paradise was published on March 26, 1920 with a first printing of 3,000 copies. The initial printing sold out in three days, confirming Fitzgerald’s prediction of overnight fame. On March 30, four days after publication and one day after selling out the first printing, Scott wired for Zelda to come to New York and get married that weekend. Barely a week after publication, Zelda and Scott married in New York on April 3, 1920

Title: This Side of Paradise
Magazine: W November 2000
Model: Anouck Lepère
Photographer: Carter Smith

{Images via Noir Facade}