Francis Scott Fitzgerald 
The Beautiful and the Damned 

The Beautiful and the Damned – Francis Scott Fitzgerald – Fitzgeralds second novel, a devastating portrait of the excesses of the Jazz Age, is a largely autobiographical depiction of a glamorous, reckless Manhattan couple and their spectacular spiral into tragedy. Published on the heels of This Side of Paradise, the story of the Harvard-educated aesthete Anthony Patch and his willful wife, Gloria, is propelled by Fitzgeralds intense romantic imagination and demonstrates an increased technical and emotional maturity. The Beautiful and Damned is at once a gripping morality tale, a rueful meditation on love, marriage, and money, and an acute social document. As Hortense Calisher observes in her Introduction, Though Fitzgerald can entrance with stories so joyfully youthful they appear to be safewhen he cuts himself, you will bleed.This book has caused an even greater sensation in America than This Side of Paradise. It is a long, searching, and absolutely convincing study of degeneration, that degeneration which ruins so many of the rich, young, idle people. The ‘smart set’ of New York is hurled into the limelight and mercilessly revealed. A witty, pungent, and entirely orginal book. An excellent portrayal of the Eastern elite at the beginning of the Jazz Age.

About the author

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 December 21, 1940) was an American Jazz Age author of novels and short stories. He is regarded as one of the greatest twentieth century writers. Fitzgerald was of the self-styled ‘Lost Generation, ‘ Americans born in the 1890s who came of age during World War I. He finished four novels, left a fifth unfinished, and wrote dozens of short stories that treat themes of youth, despair, and age.