Fitzgerald, F. Scott

8vo. Original gilt-stamped green cloth; spine imprint rubbed. Original illustrated dust jacket; spine faded, some rubbing at extremities with old tape reinforcements on verso. Half-morocco case.

Sotheby's New York, 9 April 1980, lot 153 (part)

Brucolli A15.1.a (for the first edition)

a remarkably revealing presentation copy, with a lengthy inscription to Zelda's psychiatrist, Dr. Carroll: "This book had a wide reading two years ago & was pronounced a critical success. The Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases ... gave it a two page review." Fitzgerald then goes on to reveal the sad truth behind the novel's inspiration, "... there is a good deal of my wife in it though of course I transposed everything factual in a world of fiction ... the book ... is true symbolicly to the long tragic story of the last seven years."

The presentation to the director of the Highland Hospital in Asheville, Robert S. Carroll, is dated April, 1936, the month that Zelda was transferred to his care from the Sheppard-Pratt Hospital in Baltimore. She was to remain under treatment in Asheville for four years.

The tragic seven years Fitzgerald notes in his presentation refers perhaps to the 1929 crash and the resulting Great Depression, but no doubt encompasses the concurrent increasing disintegration of his wife's mental health during this same period. The slow tragedy would not get much better and in fact Fitzgerald was at a terribly low point himself by this time. Staying at the local Grove Park Inn, he attempted his own mental rehabilitation of sorts from vast gin drinking by downing up to 50 beers a day. A drunken jump into the inn's swimming pool left him with a broken arm to go along with an institutionalized wife across town.

Accompanied by a two page autograph letter signed, [April, 1936] written from the Grove Park Inn, presenting Dr. Carroll with a copy of Zelda's largely autobiographical novel, Save Me the Waltz: "It is an oddly tasteless book, seeming to be oriented to nothing. Parts of it made me angry ..." Fitzgerald then goes on to defend his boxing prowess in a quarrel with a French friend of Zelda's.

The Highland Hospital was the scene of the final tragedy for F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, with Zelda dying in a fire at the hospital in 1948.

A truly evocative association copy.