ISBN The Beautiful and Damned

The Beautiful and 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
 


About author(s)
F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota. He attended Princeton University, where he began writing what would become his first novel, This Side of Paradise. He left Princeton to join the army during World War I, though the war ended shortly after his enlistment. This Side of Paradise, published in 1920, was a critical and financial success and was followed the same year by his first story collection, Flappers and Philosophers, followed by Tales of the Jazz Age in 1922. Fitzgerald went on to publish three more novels—The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night—and many more stories. He died in 1940, leaving his last novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, unfinished.