The Beautiful And Damned

The Beautiful and Damned, first published by Scribner's in 1922, is F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel. It explores and portrays New York café society and the American Eastern elite during the Jazz Age before and after the Great War and in the early 1920s.[1][2] As in his other novels, Fitzgerald's characters in this novel are complex, especially with respect to marriage and intimacy. The work generally is considered to be based on Fitzgerald's relationship and marriage with his wife Zelda Fitzgerald

Feel the swing and sway of the Jazz Age in this collection of stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned explores the world of America’s upper class during World War I and the beginning of the Jazz Age. Loosely based on Fitzgerald’s relationship with his wife, Zelda, the novel centers around Anthony Patch, a young East Coast socialite who is heir to his grandfather’s fortune and lacks motivation to pursue a meaningful career. In his attempt to find his place in society while waiting for his inheritance, Anthony loses himself to alcoholism; neglects his wife, Gloria; and struggles with the realities of everyday life. This volume also includes seven short stories by Fitzgerald published in the early 1920s, including “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.”

The complete collection of available poems and writing from Aaron Everingham.

Fitzgerald's 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 Fitzgerald's 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 safe-- when he cuts himself, you will bleed."

"First published in 1922"--Copyright page.

"We know the old adage about judging books by their covers, but how could you not when the covers are as lovely as these?" —Vogue (U.K.) The jacket design by Coralie Bickford-Smith reflects the elegance and glamour of the Art Deco period paired with the modern aesthetic of mechanical repetition. Each jacket comes with a detachable bookmark. Anthony and Gloria are the essence of Jazz Age glamour. A brilliant and magnetic couple, they fling themselves at life with an energy that is thrilling. New York is a playground where they dance and drink for days on end. Their marriage is a passionate theatrical performance; they are young, rich, alive and lovely and they intend to inherit the earth. But as money becomes tight, their marriage becomes impossible. And with their inheritance still distant, Anthony and Gloria must grow up and face reality; they may be beautiful but they are also damned.

In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him. Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a sort of intellectual "There!"—yet at the brink of this story he has as yet gone no further than the conscious stage. As you first see him he wonders frequently whether he is not without honor and slightly mad, a shameful and obscene thinness glistening on the surface of the world like oil on a clean pond, these occasions being varied, of course, with those in which he thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows.This was his healthy state and it made him cheerful, pleasant, and very attractive to intelligent men and to all women. In this state he considered that he would one day accomplish some quiet subtle thing that the elect would deem worthy and, passing on, would join the dimmer stars in a nebulous, indeterminate heaven half-way between death and immortality. Until the time came for this effort he would be Anthony Patch—not a portrait of a man but a distinct and dynamic personality, opinionated, contemptuous, functioning from within outward—a man who was aware that there could be no honor and yet had honor, who knew the sophistry of courage and yet was brave.