The Beautiful and Damned [Paperback]

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 Damneddepicts 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
 “Full of precisely observed life.” —Arthur MizenerF. Scott Fitzgeraldwas 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, andTender Is the Nightin 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 includeFlappers and Philosophers(1920),The Beautiful and Damned(1922),Tales of the Jal3ã