The Beautiful and Damned

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Jul 2014 · Open Road Media

About this ebook

A brilliant, sharp-edged novel of the Jazz Age by its most famous chronicler

With his impeccable lineage and Harvard education, twenty-five-year-old Anthony Patch is one of the sparkling lights of New York society. The presumptive heir to an enormous fortune, he marries the tempestuous Kansas City socialite Gloria Gilbert, and the two embark on a life of wild extravagance and profligate pleasure, assuming that whatever they cannot afford today they will be able to pay for tomorrow. But when Anthony’s inheritance disappears, so too does his sense of invincibility. A brief tour in the Great War—where he finds comfort in another woman’s arms—cannot correct Anthony’s downward trajectory, and the marriage that began with such glittering promise ends in shambles.

Fitzgerald’s next novel, The Great Gatsby, would be his masterwork. But The Beautiful and Damned, with its evocative parallels to his relationship with Zelda and its prescient portrait of a man tumbling from dazzling heights to gloomy depths, is arguably his most personal.
 
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About the author

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) was born in St. Paul, Minnesota and attended Princeton University. His debut novel, This Side of Paradise—published when he was twenty-three years old—was an immediate success, selling out of its first printing in three days. He would go on to write some of the finest short stories and novels of the twentieth century, including The Beautiful and Damned, Tender Is the Night, and The Great Gatsby, and he became an icon of the Jazz Age—a term he coined.