The Romantic Egoists/a Pictorial Autobiography from the Scrapbooks and Albums of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald

The “pictorial autobiography” of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald is a fascinating chronicle of two lives that have become legendary. The Romantic Egoists draws almost entirely from the scrap books and photograph albums which the Fitzgeralds scrupulously kept as their personal record. That record contains a wealth of material never published before.

In a unique and permanent way this book gives Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s own story. The variety is surprising: a dance program of Zelda Sayre’s; Scott’s thoughts about his early loves in St. Paul, Minn.; a picture of the country club in Montgomery, Alabama, where the first two met; reviews of This Side of Paradise; poems to them from Ring Lardner; snapshots of their trips abroad; Scott’s careful accounting of his earnings; a photograph of the house on Long Island where The Great Gatsby was conceived; the postcards drawn by Scott for his daughter. It all combines into a narrative in which the rare pictures and memorabilia are augmented by selections from Scott and Zelda’s own writing, setting the spirit of a particular moment in their lives. Scottie Fitzgerald Smith says in her introduction, “We’ve tried hard to balance the literary with the personal, and the familiar with the more obscure…to make it their book, rather than a book about them.”

The Romantic Egoists has a special feature – a section of eight pages in color of Zelda Fitzgerald’s paintings, most of them now reproduced for the first time.