Scott Fitzgerald first set foot in Montgomery in June 1918, a twenty-one-year-old Army lieutenant assigned to Camp Sheridan during World War I. The following month, at a country club dance, he met eighteen-year-old Zelda Sayre. She was beautiful, reckless, and locally famous for it. He was nobody yet, with an unpublished manuscript in his footlocker. They married in April 1920, one week after his debut novel, This Side of Paradise, made him an overnight literary sensation. What followed was a decade of dazzling, self-destructive fame: New York parties, a daughter born in St. Paul in 1921, years in France where Scott completed The Great Gatsby, short stories that paid the bills while the novels gestated. By the time the Fitzgeralds returned to Montgomery in 1931, the party was definitively over. Scott was drinking heavily. Zelda had been diagnosed as schizophrenic. The Jazz Age they had personified was finished.

The house at 919 Felder Avenue, built in 1904, became an unlikely literary workshop. Scott labored on Tender Is the Night, the novel that would take him nine years to finish and that many critics consider his most emotionally complex work. He also spent five weeks in Hollywood rewriting a screenplay. Meanwhile, Zelda -- channeling her own turbulent experience into prose -- outlined and began writing her only novel, Save Me the Waltz, a thinly veiled account of their marriage that Scott would later accuse her of stealing from his material. She also painted and wrote short stories. The creative energy inside that Cloverdale house was extraordinary, even as the marriage was disintegrating. Two writers, drawing from the same well of shared experience, racing to tell their version of the story first.

After the Fitzgeralds left in 1932, the house was carved into apartments and quietly faded from public memory. By 1986, it faced demolition. Julian and Leslie McPhillips, a Montgomery family, purchased the property and established the Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum, which opened to the public in 1989. Today the museum displays letters, personal possessions, photographs, first-edition novels, and several of Zelda's paintings -- vivid, sometimes unsettling canvases that reveal an artistic talent overshadowed by her husband's fame and her own illness. Two upstairs apartments, the 'Zelda Suite' and the 'Scott Suite,' are available to rent through Airbnb, letting visitors sleep in the same rooms where two of America's most famous writers once worked, argued, and tried to hold their family together.

The museum annually awards the Fitzgerald Prize for Literary Excellence to an author whose work continues the legacy of American storytelling while exemplifying the craft, wit, and social insight that defined Scott Fitzgerald's writing. It is a fitting tribute from a house that witnessed both the creative peak and the personal unraveling of its most famous residents. Zelda's father died on November 17, 1931, while the family lived here -- another weight added to a year already heavy with loss. The Fitzgeralds' story ended badly: Scott dead of a heart attack at forty-four in Hollywood, Zelda killed in a hospital fire in North Carolina in 1948. But in Montgomery, in this careful museum on a quiet residential street in the Cloverdale Historic District, the best of what they created endures.