Save Me the Waltz

Save Me the Waltz is a 1932 novel by American writer Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald. It is a semi-autobiographical account of her early life in the American South during the Jim Crow era and her tempestuous marriage to novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. She composed the work while a patient at Johns Hopkins Hospital's Phipps Clinic in Baltimore, Maryland. As part of her recovery routine, she spent at least two hours a day writing a novel. She sent the manuscript to her husband's editor, Maxwell Perkins. Although unimpressed by the manuscript, Perkins published the work in order for Fitzgerald to repay his financial debt to his publisher Scribner's. Divided into four chapters, the novel is a chronological narrative of four periods in the lives of Alabama Beggs and her alcoholic husband David Knight, two Jazz Age hedonists who are thinly-disguised alter-egos of their real-life counterparts. As her marriage deteriorates, Alabama grows further apart from her husband and their daughter. Determined to be famous, an aging Alabama aspires to become a renowned prima ballerina and devotes herself relentlessly to this ambition. However, a blister soon becomes infected from the glue in the box of her pointe shoe, leading to blood poisoning, and Alabama can never dance again. Upon its publication by Scribner's, the novel received generally negative reviews. The book sold approximately 1,300 copies for which Zelda earned a grand total of $120.73. Its critical and commercial failure greatly disappointed Zelda and led her to pursue her other interests as a playwright and a painter. However, Broadway producers declined to produce her play, and when her paintings were exhibited in 1934, the critical response was equally disappointing. Forty years after its publication, Zelda's biographer Nancy Milford speculated in 1970 that F. Scott Fitzgerald extensively rewrote Zelda's novel prior to publication. This supposition was echoed by later biographers. However, scholarly examinations of Zelda's earlier drafts of Save Me the Waltz and the published version disproved this speculation. Nearly every revision was by Zelda and, contrary to Milford's biography, her husband did not rewrite the manuscript.