Reginald A. Fessenden House
The Reginald A. Fessenden House is a historic house at 45 Waban Hill Road in the village of Chestnut Hill in Newton, Massachusetts. It was the residence from 1919 to his death in 1932 of the inventor Reginald A. Fessenden (1866–1932), called "the father of radio broadcasting," because he was the first to broadcast the human voice and music by radio. The house was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1976 in recognition of Fessenden's accomplishments.
Zelda Fitzgerald
At the time of his sudden death in 1940, Scott believed himself a failure, and Zelda's death in 1948 was little noted. However, interest in the Fitzgeralds surged in the years following their deaths. In 1950, screenwriter Budd Schulberg, who knew the couple from his Hollywood years, wrote "The Disenchanted", with characters based recognizably on the Fitzgeralds who end up as forgotten former celebrities, he awash with alcohol and she befuddled by mental illness. It was followed in 1951 by Cornell University professor Arthur Mizener's "The Far Side of Paradise," a biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald that rekindled interest in the couple among scholars. Mizener's biography was serialized in "The Atlantic Monthly," and a story about the book appeared in "Life" magazine, then one of America's most widely read and discussed periodicals. Scott was viewed as a fascinating failure; Zelda's mental health was largely blamed for his lost potential.
A play based on "The Disenchanted" opened on Broadway in 1958. Also that year, Scott's Hollywood mistress Sheilah Graham published a memoir, "Beloved Infidel", about his last years. "Beloved Infidel" became a bestseller and later a film starring Gregory Peck as Scott and Deborah Kerr as Graham. The book and movie painted him in a more sympathetic light than the earlier works. In 1970, however, the history of Scott and Zelda's marriage saw its most profound revision in a book by Nancy Milford, then a graduate student at Columbia University. "Zelda: A Biography", the first book-length treatment of Zelda's life, became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and figured for weeks on "The New York Times" best-seller list. The book recast Zelda as an artist in her own right whose talents were belittled by a controlling husband. Thus in the 1970s Zelda became an icon of the feminist movement—a woman whose unappreciated potential had been suppressed by patriarchal society. When Tennessee Williams dramatized the Fitzgeralds' lives in the 1980s in "Clothes for a Summer Hotel", he drew heavily on Milford's account. A caricature of Scott and Zelda emerged: as epitomes of the Jazz Age's glorification of youth, as representatives of the Lost Generation, and as a parable about the pitfalls of too much success.