Tender Is The Night and Save Me The Waltz

Prominent literary society spouses F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Fitzgerald famously chronicled their stormy marriage in Tender is the Night and Save Me the Waltz, respectively, providing conflicting yet remarkably consistent views of a marriage besieged by personal illness and neglect.

A deliberately ambitious work, Tender is the Night is the compelling story of Dick Diver, a gifted psychoanalyst at the beginning of his career, his wife Nicole, one of his patients, and their holiday encounter with Rosemary Hoyt. Tender is the Night was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final, and most autobiographical, novel, capturing in fiction the complexity, frustration, and depth and ultimate destruction of love between Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, who was at the time of writing confined in a mental institution.

Save Me the Waltz follows the story of southern belle Alabama Beggs who is married to the successful, but philandering, artist David Knight. Desperate for David’s attention and for success in her own right, Alabama devotes herself to building, and ultimately achieving, success as a ballerina. Written while Zelda Fitzgerald was being treated for schizophrenia at the Phipps Clinic, Save Me Waltz is evocative of high society in the Jazz Age and a woman’s quest to define herself both within and outside of her marriage.

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