the spring of 1927. The family remained at "Ellerslie" for two years, except for a visit to Paris in the summer of 1928, but Fitzgerald was still unable to make significant progress on his novel. At this time Zelda began ballet training, wanting to become a professional dancer. The Fitzgeralds returned to France in the spring of 1929, where Zelda's intense ballet work damaged her health and pushed them apart. In April 1930 she suffered her first breakdown. Zelda was treated at Prangins clinic in Switzerland until September 1931, while Fitzgerald lived in Swiss hotels. Work on the novel was again suspended as he wrote short stories to pay for psychiatric treatment. Fitzgerald's peak story fee of $4000 from The Saturday Evening Post may have had in 1929 the purchasing power of $40,000 in 1994 dollars. Nonetheless, the general view of his affluence is distorted. Fitzgerald was not one of the highest-paid writers of his time; his novels earned comparatively little, and most of his income came from 160 magazine stories. During the 1920s his income from all sources averaged under $25,000 a year—a lot of money at a time when teacher's average annual salary was $1,299, but not a fortune. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald did spend money faster than he earned it; the author who wrote so much about the effects of money on character was unable to manage his own finances. The Fitzgeralds returned to America in the fall of 1931 and rented a house in Montgomery. Fitzgerald made a second unsuccessful trip to Hollywood in 1931. Zelda suffered a relapse in February 1932 and entered Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. She spent the rest of her life as a resident or outpatient of sanitariums. In 1932, while a patient at Johns Hopkins, Zelda rapidly wrote Save Me the Waltz. Her autobiographical novel generated bad feelings between the Fitzgeralds, for he regarded it as giving away the material that he was using in his novel-in-progress. Fitzgerald rented "...
