Zelda Fitzgerald was born in Montgomery, Alabama, on June 22, 1896. She is the only child of Charles Arthur "C.A." Ogden and Frances Margaret Taliaferro Taliaferro. Her father was a successful mining engineer who later became the president of the Eagle Silver Company, an influential mining company in Alabama. He died suddenly of blood poisoning in 1909, just after Zelda had turned five years old
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Her mother took care of Zelda during most of her childhood. Her mother's health declined rapidly following her husband's death and she died in 1917 at the age of forty-nine.
Zelda Fitzgerald grew up in Montgomery and moved with her mother to Fayetteville, North Carolina, when she was nine years old. She attended public schools there and then went on to study at Wellesley College in Massachusetts.
In 1918 she began what would be her only real love affair while still a teenager: a brief marriage to an older man named Douglas Robinson with whom she lived for two years while she completed her education at Wellesley and earned a degree in English literature.
The relationship ended when he asked for a divorce and Zelda returned to Montgomery where she waited until she met and married Ernest Hemingway in 1921; they were divorced two years later. She continued to live with her parents until 1924 when she left for Paris where she lived for eight years before moving to Key West, Florida, with her second husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald (the son of "C.A.'s" partner), whom she divorced in 1932; Zelda subsequently moved back to Paris where she lived until 1940 when she moved back to the United States and settled in Wyoming.
In 1945, after serving as a nurse during World War II and raising one son (Ernest Hemingway) and one daughter (Scottie Fitzgerald), Zelda committed suicide by shooting herself in the head from close range with a twelve gauge shotgun that had been given to her by Hemingway shortly after their divorce.
The gun was still loaded when it fired because it had not been unloaded properly according to Hemingway's instructions shortly before he left for Africa on safari less than three weeks earlier. Hemingway's body was discovered in his hotel room in Ketchum, Idaho, four days after he committed suicide using a shotgun provided by his friend Erskine Caldwell. He was thirty-six years old when he committed suicide by shooting himself in the head with a twelve gauge shotgun that had been given to