The Beautiful and Damned

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s second novel—written at a pivotal moment in his career—is now available in a beautifully designed special collector’s edition.

The Beautiful and Damned is a stunning satire of the glamorous but doomed marriage between Anthony Patch and his wife, Gloria. Harvard-educated Patch is waiting for his inheritance upon his grandfather’s death. His marriage to Gloria is fueled by alcohol and destroyed by greed. This shallow, pleasure-seeking couple race through a series of fiascoes—first in hilarity, then in despair.

A devastating portrait of the nouveaux rich, New York nightlife, reckless ambition, and squandered talent, The Beautiful and Damned was published in 1922 on the heels of Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise. This keenly observed novel signaled Fitzgerald’s maturity as a storyteller and confirmed his enormous talent as a novelist.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896. He attended Princeton University, joined the United States Army during World War I, and published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920. That same year he married Zelda Sayre and for the next decade the couple lived in New York, Paris, and on the Riviera. Fitzgerald’s masterpieces include The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night. He died at the age of forty-four while working on The Last Tycoon. Fitzgerald’s fiction has secured his reputation as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century.