The Beautiful and Damned

The Beautiful and Damned (1922) is Fitzgerald's searching portrait of Anthony Patch and Gloria Gilbert, a dazzling young couple whose beauty, wit, and expectations of inherited wealth curdle into idleness, alcoholism, and moral exhaustion. Written in a style at once lyrical, satirical, and psychologically acute, the novel belongs to the literature of the Jazz Age while also extending the naturalist tradition: glamour is rendered as a fragile surface beneath which social privilege and spiritual ...