The Beautiful and the Damned

The classic novel of greed and vice from F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Set in an era of intoxicating excitement and ruinous excess, changing manners and challenged morals, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s second novel chronicles the lives of Harvard-educated Anthony Patch and his beautiful, willful wife, Gloria. This bitingly ironic story eerily foretells the fate of the author and his own wife, Zelda—from its giddy romantic beginnings to its alcohol-fueled demise. A portrait of greed, ambition, and squandered talent, The Beautiful and Damned depicts an America embarked on the greatest spree in its history, a world Fitzgerald saw “with clearer eyes than any of his contemporaries.”* By turns hilarious, heartbreaking, and chillingly prophetic, it remains one of his best-known works, which Gertrude Stein correctly predicted “will be read when many of his well-known contemporaries are forgotten.”

*Tobias Wolff
 

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota, and educated at the Newman School and at Princeton. This Side of Paradise, his first novel, was published in 1920 and transformed him virtually overnight into a spokesman for his generation and a prophet of the Jazz Age. That same year, he married Zelda Sayre, and the two became America’s most celebrated expatriates, dividing their time among New York, Paris, and the Riviera during the Twenties. Fitzgerald’s most famous novel, The Great Gatsby, was published in 1925, and Tender Is the Night in 1934. After Scott and Zelda were forced by money and health problems to return to the States, Fitzgerald became a writer for Hollywood movie studios. He died in 1940 while working on his unfinished novel of Hollywood, The Last Tycoon. His other works include Flappers and Philosophers (1920), The Beautiful and Damned (1922), Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), All the Sad Young Men (1926), and Taps at Reveille (1935).

Ruth Prigozy is Professor of English and Film Studies at Hofstra University. She is Executive Director of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society, which she co-founded in 1990. She has published widely on F. Scott Fitzgerald as well as on Ernest Hemingway, J.D. Salinger, the Hollywood Ten, and film directors Billy Wilder, D.W. Griffith, and Vittorio de Sica. She has edited Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby, and The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald. She is the author of F. Scott Fitzgerald: An Illustrated Life. She has co-edited two volumes on detective fiction and film, one on the short story, and two collections of essays on Fitzgerald.