Fitzgerald, Zelda

Save Me the Waltz. Scribner's, New York, 1932

8vo (7 1/2 x 5 1/4 ins; 190 x 133 mm).  Publisher's sea-green cloth lettered in pale blue; cloth a faded with a few spots, old ownership stamp to endpaper and top edge. Original dust-jacket with Cleonike illustration; slightly rubbed and faded with light staining to front panel and minor creasing at ends of spine panel.

Bruccoli I1

First edition of Zelda's only novel. Written during a six-week period while at the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic in Baltimore (she was there from February to June 1932 following her second breakdown),  the extensive use of autobiographical material greatly angered Scott. His rejection and the rejection by readers in general of her unusual prose further depressed her. Yet the work has undergone a  complete reappraisal, "That the novel was written in two months is amazing. That for all its flaws it still manages to charm, amuse and move the reader is even more remarkable. Zelda Fitzgerald succeeded, in this novel, in conveying her own heroic desperation to succeed at something of her own, and she also managed to distinguish herself as a writer with, as Edmund Wilson once said of her husband, a 'gift for turning language into something iridescent and surprising'"  (Michiko Kakutani).