The novel's plot follows the privileged life of Alabama Beggs, a Southern belle who grows up the Deep South during the Jim Crow era and marries David Knight, an aspiring painter.

[1] Following the decline of her mental health in Europe, Zelda wrote the novel in January–February 1932 while in Montgomery, Alabama, and then as a voluntary patient at Johns Hopkins Hospital's Phipps Clinic in Baltimore.

Unimpressed by her manuscript,[4] Perkins published the revised novel at the urging of her husband Scott Fitzgerald in order for the couple to repay financial debts incurred by Zelda's stays at expensive institutions.

Alabama Beggs, a coddled Southern belle "incubated in the mystic pungence of Negro mammies",[20] comes of age in the Deep South during the Jim Crow era.

[30] In September 1929, after receiving an invitation to dance with the San Carlo Opera Ballet Company in Naples,[31] Zelda undertook a grueling daily practice of up to eight hours a day.

[29] A month later, in October 1929, during an automobile trip to Paris along the mountainous roads of the Grande Corniche, Zelda seized the car's steering wheel and tried to kill herself, her husband, and their 9-year-old daughter Scottie by driving over a cliff.

[36]) Dr. Oscar Forel wrote in his psychiatric diagnosis: "The more I saw Zelda, the more I thought at the time [that] she is neither [suffering from] a pure neurosis nor a real psychosis—I considered her a constitutional, emotionally unbalanced psychopath—she may improve, [but] never completely recover.

[38] Following the Fitzgeralds return from Europe and after another mental health episode, Zelda insisted—over her husband's financial objections—that she be admitted to the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

"[43] He deemed the novel's overall tone to be hopelessly "dated" and evocative of the bygone Jazz Age hedonism in Scott Fitzgerald's 1922 work, The Beautiful and Damned.

[45] Perusing the manuscript, he objected to her plagiarism of his character Amory Blaine, the protagonist of This Side of Paradise, and her use of the same autobiographical plot elements as his forthcoming novel.

"[47] Despite Scott's initial reaction, a debt-ridden Fitzgerald believed that Zelda's book might improve their financial situation, and the couple speedily resolved their disagreements.

"[7]Perkins did not share Scott's enthusiasm for Zelda's novel and, although still unimpressed by her revised manuscript,[4] he consented to publish the work regardless as a way for the couple to repay their financial debt to Scribner's.

[50] At the time, much of this financial debt resulted from Zelda's medical bills for her extended voluntary stays at the Phipps Clinic and other expensive psychiatric institutions.

[52] According to Zelda, the novel's title derives from a Victor record catalog, evoking the glamorous lifestyle which the couple enjoyed during the riotous Jazz Age.

[55] A particularly harsh review in The New York Times lambasted not only Zelda but her editor Max Perkins: "It is not only that her publishers have not seen fit to curb an almost ludicrous lushness of writing but they have not given the book the elementary services of a literate proofreader.

[56] McFee wrote: "In this book, with all its crudity of conception, its ruthless purloinings of technical tricks and its pathetic striving after philosophic profundity, there is the promise of a new and vigorous personality in fiction.

"[55]Malcolm Cowley, a friend of the Fitzgeralds, read Zelda's book and wrote consolingly to her husband Scott, "It moves me a lot: she has something there that nobody got into words before.

"[55] Another friend, Ernest Hemingway, believed the work lacked artistic merit and warned editor Max Perkins that if he ever published a novel by any of his wives, "I'll bloody well shoot you.

[9] The [novel's poor sales] won't be encouraging to you, and I have not liked to ask whether you were writing any more because of the fact, but I do think the last part of that book, in particular, was very fine; and if we [both Perkins and Zelda] had not been in the depths of depression, the result would have been quite different.

In 1991, The New York Times literary critic Michiko Kakutani reviewed the work and opined "that for all its flaws it still manages to charm, amuse and move the reader is even more remarkable.

[15] Contrary to this unfounded speculation, later scholarly examinations of Zelda's drafts of Save Me the Waltz deposited in the Fitzgerald Papers at Princeton University Library proved Milford's assumptions to be false.