On this day in 1948, F. Scott Fitzgerald's wife, Zelda, and eight other patients were killed in a fire at the Highland Mental Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. Zelda's first breakdown in 1930 resulted in a sixteen-month stay in a Swiss clinic, and she spent six and a half of the next eight years in American institutions. Though discharged to her mother's care in the Spring of 1940 -- Fitzgerald was in Hollywood, and just months away from a fatal heart attack -- she would periodically readmit herself to Highland. It was during one of these stays that she and the others died, unable to flee the rooms into which they had been locked for the evening ... FULL STORY »
