A story of Americans on the French Riviera in the 1930s is a portrait of psychological disintegration as a wealthy couple supports friends and hangers-on financially and emotionally at the cost of their own stability

When beautiful, reckless, seventeen-year-old Zelda Sayre meets Lieutenant Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald at a country club dance, he isn't rich or settled; no one knows his people; and he wants, of all things, to be a writer in New York. After Scott sells his first novel, Zelda defies her parents to marry him in the vestry of St. Patrick's Cathedral. It is the Jazz Age, and for Zelda and Scott the future will be grander and stranger than they could...