Birthday Celebration 2025

Infidelity was a constant theme in F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s marriage, with both engaging in flirtatious behavior; but none had a more profound impact than Zelda’s affair in the summer of 1924 with a French aviator which severely fractured their relationship. As Zelda subsequently wrote, “It was a sad love affair and none of them remembered the fact that what counts is not the kiss but the loyalties that are broken.” And never could the young Naval pilot have imagined that their brief interlude would shape Fitzgerald’s most famous work, fiction yielding to truth when Daisy tells Gatsby, “I can’t help what’s past. I did love him once but I loved you too.”

Kendall Taylor is the author of two books on F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Sometimes Madness Is Wisdom: Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald––A Marriage (2003) and The Gatsby Affair: Scott, Zelda, and the Betrayal That Shaped an American Classic (2018). She has taught at George Washington University, American University, and the State University of New York. She has served as head of the National Exhibitions Program at the Library of Congress, as academic director of American University’s Washington Semester Program in Art and Architecture, and as Vice-President for Planning, Research and Institutional Advancement at Friends World College. She has lectured on The Great Gatsby as part NEA’s “Big Read” program and contributed to the Audible Book series “American Dreamer: Who Was Jay Gatsby?” Her forthcoming works include Hinged, a memoir of second-wave feminism, and Girls in the Woods, a true account of young women surviving the Holocaust in Poland’s forests.