Odyssey of a Wandering Mind

"Sara Mayfield was born into Alabama's governing elite in 1905 and grew up in a social circle that included Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, Sara Haardt Mencken, and Tallulah and Eugenia Bankhead. A precocious child, Mayfield befriended H. L. Mencken in college, then visited with the Fitzgeralds and hobnobbed with the literati while traveling in Europe after a failed marriage in the 1920s. Returning to Alabama during the Depression, she briefly ran the family plantation before departing for New York City where she became involved in the theatre. Inventing a plastic compound derived from cotton while working on theatrical sets, she applied for a patent and set her sights on a livelihood as an inventor and businesswoman. With the advent of World War II, Mayfield returned to her family home in Tuscaloosa where she expanded her experiments, freelanced as journalist, and doggedly pursued a bizarre series of military and intelligence schemes, prompting temporary hospitalization. In 1945, she mingled with a host of cultural figures while reporting on the creation of the United Nations from Mexico and California, but she struggled to find her place in Tuscaloosa society after the war, becoming increasingly paranoid about conspiracies arrayed against her. Finally, her mother and brother committed her to Bryce Hospital for the Insane, where she remained for the next seventeen years. Throughout her life, Mayfield kept journals, wrote fiction, and produced thousands of letters while nursing the overriding ambition that drove her since childhood: to write and publish books. During her confinement, Mayfield assiduously recorded her experiences and her determined efforts-sometimes delusional, always savvy-to overturn her diagnosis and return to the world as a sane, independent adult. At 59, she did just that, securing her release "having been returned to sanity," then publishing literary biographies of Mencken and the Fitzgeralds plus a novel, finally achieving her lifelong quest to become an author of books and her own life. In Odyssey of a Wandering Mind, noted writer Jennifer Horne draws on years of research and an intimate understanding of the vast archive Mayfield left behind to sensitively render her struggle to move through the world as the person she was-and her ultimate success in surviving to define the terms of her story"--