Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda

“Pure and lovely…to read Zelda’s letters is to fall in love with her.” —The Washington Post

Edited by renowned Fitzgerald scholars Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Barks, with an introduction by Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's granddaughter, Eleanor Lanahan, this compilation of over three hundred love letters tells the couple's epic love story in their own words.

Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's devotion to each other endured for more than twenty-two years, through the highs and lows of his literary success and alcoholism, and her mental illness. In Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda, over three hundred of their collected love letters show why theirs has long been heralded as one of the greatest love stories of the 20th century.

Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda is a welcome addition to the Fitzgerald literary canon and an essential collection for readers of American literature, Jazz Age history, and literary biography.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896. He attended Princeton University, joined the United States Army during World War I, and published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920. That same year he married Zelda Sayre and for the next decade the couple lived in New York, Paris, and on the Riviera. Fitzgerald’s novels include The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night. He died at the age of forty-four while working on The Last Tycoon. Fitzgerald’s fiction has secured his reputation as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century.

Eleanor Lanahan attended Sarah Lawrence College and the Rhode Island School of Design. After twenty years of commercial illustration and for children’s books under the married name Eleanor Hazard, she illustrated The Big Green Book by Madeleine Kunin and Marilyn Stout. As Eleanor Lanahan, she wrote the books Scottie, The Daughter of... and Zelda, An Illustrated Life, as well as animated the movies The Naked Hitch-Hiker and One Alcoholic to Another. Lanahan lives in Vermont.