Save Me the Waltz

Save Me the Waltz is a 1932 novel by American writer Zelda Fitzgerald. The novel's plot follows the privileged life of Alabama Beggs, a Southern belle who grows up the Deep South during the Jim Crow era and marries David Knight, an aspiring painter. After engaging in a carefree life of hedonistic excess during the riotous Jazz Age, an aging Alabama aspires to be a prima ballerina, but an infected blister from her pointe shoe leads to blood poisoning and ends her dream of fame. Much of the semi-autobiographical plot reflects Zelda Fitzgerald's own life and her marriage to writer F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Following the decline of her mental health in Europe, Zelda wrote the novel in January–February 1932 while in Montgomery, Alabama, and then as a voluntary patient at Johns Hopkins Hospital's Phipps Clinic in Baltimore. She sent the manuscript to Maxwell Perkins, an editor at Scribner's. Unimpressed by her manuscript, Perkins published the revised novel at the urging of her husband Scott Fitzgerald in order for the couple to repay financial debts incurred by Zelda's stays at expensive institutions.

Although Scott Fitzgerald praised the novel's quality, literary critics panned the novel for its lush prose and weak characterization. The book sold approximately 1,300 copies, and Zelda earned a grand total of $120.73. Its critical and commercial failure dispirited Zelda and led her to pursue other interests as a playwright and a painter. After investors declined to produce her play, her husband arranged an exhibition of her paintings, but the critical response proved equally disappointing.

In 1959, a decade after her death, Zelda's friend and literary critic Edmund Wilson wrote in The New Yorker magazine that readers should not infer too much about the Fitzgeralds' marriage based on Save Me the Waltz as the semi-fictional novel merely presents the glamorous fantasy that Zelda and Scott created about their lives. Wilson stated that acquaintance Morley Callaghan's 1963 memoir That Summer in Paris provides a more accurate depiction of the Fitzgeralds' marriage while in Europe.

In 1970, forty years after its publication, biographer Nancy Milford speculated that Zelda's husband rewrote the novel prior to publication. Scholarly examinations of Zelda's drafts and revised galleys debunked this speculation. Archival evidence shows that Scott Fitzgerald did not rewrite the novel, and the revised galleys show nearly all marks to be in Zelda's hand. Despite such scholarly refutations, popular myths persist that Scott rewrote Zelda's novel or tried to suppress its publication.