At the height of their fame, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald dramatized their relationship as a charming romance of regionalism, a Northern man’s pursuit of a Southern belle. This collection of thirteen essays reveals that tensions between sectionalism and nationalism run much deeper in their work than previously appreciated.

The Romance of Regionalism in the Work of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald: The South Side of Paradise explores resonances of "Southernness" in works by American culture’s leading literary couple. At the height of their fame, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald dramatized their relationship as a romance of regionalism, as the charming tale of a Northern man wooing a Southern belle. Their writing exposes deeper sectional conflicts, however: from the seemingly unexorcisable fixation with the Civil War and the historical revisionism of the Lost Cause to popular culture’s depiction of the South as an artistically deprived, economically broken backwater, the couple challenged early twentieth-century stereotypes of life below the Mason-Dixon line.

From their most famous efforts (The Great Gatsby and Save Me the Waltz) to their more overlooked and obscure (Scott’s 1932 story “Family in the Wind,” Zelda’s “The Iceberg,” published in 1918 before she even met her husband), Scott and Zelda returned obsessively to the challenges of defining Southern identity in a country in which “going south” meant decay and dissolution. Contributors to this volume tackle a range of Southern topics, including belle culture, the picturesque and the Gothic, Confederate commemoration and race relations, and regional reconciliation. As the collection demonstrates, the Fitzgeralds’ fortuitous meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1918 sparked a Southern renascence in miniature.

Acknowledgments

A Note on the Text

Introduction: Scott and Zelda on the South Side of Paradise

Kirk Curnutt and Sara A. Kosiba

Part One: Inconstant Circles

Chapter One: Sara Mayfield: Zelda’s Southern Biographer

Jennifer Horne

Chapter Two: Bittersweet Memories: Southern Womanhood in the Work of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, Sarah Haardt Mencken, and Estelle Oldham Faulkner

Ashley Lawson

Part Two: Tarleton Trespasses: City Limits and Artistic Expanses

Chapter Three: The Sounds and the Smells of the South: The Meaning and Use of the Auditory and Olfactory in Fitzgerald’s Tarleton Trilogy

Niklas Salmose

Chapter Four: From Jelly-Bean to Jazz-Master (and Back): Region, Class, and Masquerade in the Jim Powell Stories

Robert Beuka

Chapter Five: What’s on Fitzgerald’s Bookcase?: A Rereading of ‘The Jelly-Bean’

John Allen Brooks

Chapter Six: Lamenting the Loss of Old Southern Charm: ‘The Last of the Belles’

Lauren Rule Maxwell

Part Three: Contested Territories

Chapter Seven: Going South: Disaster Beneath the Mason-Dixon Line in The Beautiful and Damned

J. Bret Maney

Chapter Eight: The Georgia-Kentucky Border and the Southern Subtext of The Great Gatsby

Bryant Mangum

Chapter Nine: Southern Domesticity Abroad: A Belle’s Failed Guide to Housekeeping

Rickie-Ann Legleitner

Chapter Ten: Expressing the Inexpressible: The Logic of Sensation in Zelda Fitzgerald’s Art

Samantha Bankston

Part Four: Border Skirmishes

Chapter Eleven: Nostalgic Exile: Mapping the South and American Modernity in ‘The Swimmers’

Jonathan Jones

Chapter Twelve: ‘Family in the Wind’: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Last Great Saturday Evening Post Story

Park Bucker

Chapter Thirteen: ‘Those Years Were Bitter on the Border’: F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Aftermath of Civil War

Helen M. Turner

Conclusion: Cartographies Interrupted: The Love of the Last Tycoon and Caesar’s Things

Kirk Curnutt

About the Contributors