In addition to the ten stories or sketches published by Zelda Fitzgerald, she wrote at least eight lost stories that are known from synopses in the files of Harold Ober, the Fitzgeralds’ literary agent.1
As with Save Me the Waltz, the six “girl” pieces—five of which were jointly bylined—occasioned literary territorial problems. F. Scott Fitzgerald reported to Ober that “most of them have been pretty strong draughts on Zelda’s and my common store of material. This [The Girl with Talent] is Mary Hay for instance + the ‘Girl the Prince Liked’ was Josephine Ordway both of whom I had in my notebook to use.”2
Most of her fiction was written between 1930 and 1932 in the clinics where she was a patient. Since the working drafts do not survive, it is impossible to assess her writing habits or the pains she took with her work. The extant stories have an improvised, spontaneous quality that may have been intentional. On the basis of the published stories it is fair to comment that she had structural difficulties: the plots are anecdotal, and the technique is essayistic. The defining qualities of her fiction are the style and wit. When Zelda Fitzgerald was able to bring her material under control, the results were remarkable—as in “Miss Ella” and “A Couple of Nuts,” the latter of which is her best story.
1. Bruccoli, “Zelda Fitzgerald’s Lost Stories,” Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual 1979, pp. 123-26.
2. Received 8 October 1929. As Ever, Scott Fitz——, ed. Bruccoli and Jennifer M. Atkinson (Philadelphia & New York: Lippincott, 1972), p. 146.