Not his best, in my opinion, as I found the first half or so very slow and rather dull.

BUT the second half was much more interesting and engrossing, and it was fascinating finding the parallels between Anthony and Gloria’s life and what I know of F. Scott and Zelda’s life.

“Life is so damned hard, so damned hard... It just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can't be hurt ever any more. That's the last and worst thing it does.”

I adore F. Scott Fitzgerald's writing. This book was beautiful and tragic. I'm in awe.

I took my time reading it.

The story moved slowly but the meaning shined through and alltogether was a great book.

I get the impression that the main male character in all his books carries a big piece of himself. Its beautiful and very sad or should I say damned?

He's a trully phenomenal writer.

F. Scott Fitzgerald is a brilliant stylist… He is full of wicked irony and he depicts his hero or his fictional alter ego as an ironic young man…

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.

The hero is filled with ambitions, ideas and ideals… But actually he is absolutely idle and self-indulgent…

Oh, he was a pretentious fool, making careers out of cocktails and meanwhile regretting, weakly and secretly, the collapse of an insufficient and wretched idealism. He had garnished his soul in the subtlest taste and now he longed for the old rubbish. He was empty, it seemed, empty as an old bottle…

The world is a vanity fair… And then he meets her – the woman of his destiny…

…the exquisite regularity of nose and upper lip, the chin, faintly decided, balanced beautifully on a rather short neck. On a photograph she must have been completely classical, almost cold – but the glow of her hair and cheeks, at once flushed and fragile, made her the most living person he had ever seen.

The radiant hour of their wedding… First happy months of marriage… Slow evaporation of magic…

Anthony found that he was living with a girl of tremendous nervous tension and of the most high-handed selfishness. Gloria knew within a month that her husband was an utter coward toward any one of a million phantasms created by his imagination.

The novel reads as a revenge on the years of the author’s lost youth…
First disappointments… Quarrels… Hiding from the world in drunkenness… Gradually they were growing more and more distant from each other… The war… Wretched service in the army… Coming back… Their marriage becomes something like a bad habit…

After that reflowering of tenderness and passion each of them had returned into some solitary dream unshared by the other and what endearments passed between them passed, it seemed, from empty heart to empty heart, echoing hollowly the departure of what they knew at last was gone.

Love is blind and love blinds those who fall victim to it.

Decades before the Who sang, “Hope I die before I get old” there was Fitzgerald and The Beautiful and Damned. For its two main characters 25 is middle aged and the curtain of old age drops rudely and irrevocably at 30. Fitzgerald, still in his mid-twenties when he wrote this novel of a young couple who burn the candle too brightly at one end, thinking romantically that it is both ends, knew, as Townsend did, that “getting old” was a mental state, not a chronological one. Anthony Patch and Gloria Gilbert aren’t so metaphorical in their thinking. Youth is beauty and beauty is all and being rich greases the wheels of decline by allowing life to be a party as long as one can afford it. The one end they light is the alcoholic end of fast movement, talk, and drink, intended to brush back Death’s herald to the young, rich and spoiled: Boredom. They are easily bored not because the world is so, though they stand by its meaninglessness quite determinedly as a reasonable substitute for boredom, but because they are. In the end they are without ideas or argument. They have youth and a tragically ticking clock.

The time of the novel is the second decade of the 20th century, which begins with them students, and continues into the years of the Great War, which they miss, and then on into the first years of the 20s, by which time they are in full decline, Anthony actually 30 and through almost all of his wealth, and Gloria approaching 30 and offended beyond words at being mistaken for 30. The Jazz Age is about to dawn, the Roaring Twenties about to roar, but these two are already washed up, desperately hoping for a contested will to deliver Anthony’s grandfather’s millions their way. Fitzgerald is not as polished or as succinctly brilliant as he will be in The Great Gatsby, but he impressively makes you care at least a little about two selfish people with little to recommend them beside their own sense of entitlement.

His description of Manhattan is vivid, often poetic. The dialogue mostly sparkles. If you never quite develop full tragic empathy for the two main characters you do for Fitzgerald. It is a shockingly prescient description of his own descent into alcoholism, bankruptcy, and a mental breakdown. Anthony is always re-drawing the line of reform, when he will cut back on his drinking, their reckless spending and partying, their delayed consideration of meaningful employment. They and others recognize their self-destructiveness but they ignore each other’s warnings and feel betrayed by those of their friends. They fall from drinking for pleasure to drinking for escape to drinking for numbness, from parties at the Plaza to anonymous O’Neillian bars to their own empty apartment. It is a sad, glittery tale of two wasted lives but a tragic preview of a great novelist’s end.

"The Beautiful and Damned" is the perfect title for this novel, as well as for the author's life with his wife Zelda.

This is Fitzgerald's second novel, and he had become wealthy and famous. His protagonist and his wife--Anthony and Gloria Patch--move in a circle of rich, hard-drinking sybarites, who seem to move glibly from party to party. (On the first edition dust jacket, Anthony and Gloria are painted as Scott & Zelda)

Anthony doesn't want to work. After graduating from Harvard, he wanders around Europe for a few years, before moving to New York City to live. He finds a nice apartment, and lives well on his allowance, while waiting for his industrialist grandfather to die, at which point he'll be a bazillionaire.

He meets Gloria, the young, beautiful cousin of his Harvard chum, Dick, and is smitten. As is she: the couple marry, enjoy a protracted honeymoon, and settle back into NYC's pre-War party scene.

Gradually, their life together crumbles. The only consistent motifs are A) that they don't want to work, and B) that their investments are not producing enough income to cover their lifestyle.

When Anthony's grandfather finally does die, he leaves not a dime to Anthony.

All-too-soon, World War One looms, and Anthony applies, with his friends Maury and Dick, to go to officer training school. Anthony fails the medical.

This doesn't prevent him from being drafted later, and he's shipped south for basic training.

Far from home, Anthony finds affection in the arms of Dot, a local girl.

The war ends before Anthony's unit can be shipped overseas, and he and Gloria are reunited. They quarrel over money, and find any excuse to drink, which seems the only way they can tolerate life and each other. They wait for Anthony's lawsuit against his grandfather's estate to settle.

Their apartments get smaller, their clothes less-trendy and more frayed, and the need for alcoholic oblivion even stronger.

What is disturbing about "The Beautiful and Damned" is how loathsome Fitzgerald obviously finds this society, especially himself.

At one point, Anthony is talking to Dick--an author of great success--and Dick talks of how vapid modern fiction is, and how everyone asks him whether he's read "This Side of Paradise." Dick decries how detestible the characters in "Paradise" are.

"This Side of Paradise," of course, was F. Scott Fitzgerald's first novel.

It's obvious that Fitzgerald and Anthony are both alcoholic, and that Gloria--like Zelda--is both a big drinker, and suffering from early stages of mental illness.

Things hit rock-bottom: Anthony has bounced checks, and been thrown out of a club where he and his friends once held court. They're at the absolute bottom. Then he wins his lawsuit. He's rich again, but we sense--as the book concludes with Anthony and Gloria aboardship for Italy--that he really didn't "win" anything at all.

This is not an easy book to read. Its tale of the bon vivant who loses everything reminded me of "The Magnificent Ambersons," but this was just so much sadder. Maybe part of it is knowing how similar is the author's life, that just three years later, he would publish "The Great Gatsby," which made it impossible for him ever to turn back.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote beautifully; he lived too fast, and died too young. Maybe that tragic darkness makes his sentences shine that much brighter.

picked up and read when i went through a 'i want to read all the classics!' phase. also, the writing in this just cemented my fangirl feelings for fitzgerald.

I’ve always looked on criticism as a sort of envious tribute.
– Gloria Patch

n  n

The Dandy, Anthony Patch, falls in love with the most sought-out girl: the beautiful and aloof Gloria. They marry and become the it couple everyone wants to be with. Their nights are full of champagne and parties, and the days are spent in idleness, waiting for the next party to fill the void. Anthony’s inheritance is endangered because of their wildness. What now? They can’t imagine a life without luxury. Nor is Anthony capable of holding on to a job.

The Beautiful and Damned was an incredible reading experience. Fitzgerald’s craftsmanship has always impressed me, but this time it took my breath away. The writing was so beautiful that it took me ages to read this book. I turned the pages carefully and read passages over and over again, devouring each word like a delicious piece of chocolate. Some parts demanded to be read aloud.

They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two: the passion of their pretense created the actuality.

I loved Fitzgerald’s depiction of the Lost Generation. The clash between the wild nights and the empty days fascinated me. The weird characters who think luxury is a birth right but cannot degrade themselves to take a job were brilliantly described. I also wanted to slap them out of their idleness. Get a hobby, you morons! Get excited about real things in life and not just fleeting things like champagne and beauty. In other words, Grow Up!

I want to marry Anthony, because husbands are so often ‘husbands’ and I must marry a lover.

The character Gloria amazed me. The way she was introduced as an almost supernatural Goddess was so cleverly done. I’ve been curious about her ever since reading the novel about Zelda Fitzgerald who was often compared to Gloria. In Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, we even get to see Zelda posing as Gloria, giving interviews as the character.

Marriage was created not to be a background but to need one. Mine is going to be outstanding. It can’t, shan’t be the setting – it’s going to be the performance, the live, lovely, glamorous performance, and the world shall be the scenery.

My blog: The Bookworm's Closet

Accidentally deleted my pre-review but I thought this book was called "The Beautiful and The Damned" until like two days ago-

Without any equivocation, the prose is beautiful—but just like beauty, the damn book had too many flaws.

Starting with painful characters who are fully absorbed in themselves. I see too many authors (male) of this era talking about women in the most misogynistic terms—frankly, that is exhausting.

My brother recommended this book to me, which is, of course, a classic. Had I read this book at a different time when I wasn't so cognizant of locker room talk, I would have overlooked it. I couldn't get past the arrogant, absorbed characters.

A woman should be able to kiss a man beautifully and romantically without any desire to be either his wife or his mistress

Maybe it's me reading too much into the book, but then this:

A sense of responsibility would spoil her. She's too pretty

...like bye.

Matthew 16:26 KJV For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?

Yes, The Beautiful and Damned may be imperfect but it's still gorgeous. Fitzgerald captures the ephemeral beauty and poignancy of life in a way that is tragic, grand, pathetic, and brilliantly ironic all at once. Everyone seems to love Gatsby but I prefer the less polished Tender Is The Night (my favourite) and The Beautiful and Damned, perhaps because the characters are so tenderly young and desperate and because I understand their desire to live vividly and recklessly. I can have pity and hope for them in a way that it's hard to feel for Gatsby, despite their callow, grasping vanities. I was young once, too, after all.

What is special about this novel is the author’s ability to make the most despicable of characters interesting. The reader is jogged into another world. There are two central characters – Anthony and Gloria. I never came close to feeling even the slightest pinch of empathy for either. Their values are opposite to my own. I sat and watched, fixated, glued to the end, but not for a second thinking that either my views or theirs would change. It is like watching a train crash.

So why did I watch? I watched because Fitzgerald, through his words, has the ability to capture an era, a group of people and places as through a movie camera. We observe millions of small thing each perfectly portrayed - light slanting through blinds, nasty arguments, NYC on a hot summer night, cocktail parties with insipid, meaningless chatter. The reader recognizes a world that does exist. I liked this realism and it is this that drew me to the book. It is the author’s writing that I like.

At the same time, the writing is definitely patchy. There are sections that are a total bore. The beginning is horrible. It took me quite a while before I knew I would not abandon the book.

Anthony is lazy, self-centered and shallow. Gloria she is lazy, self-centered and shallow too. Anthony does not want a vocation; he can’t possibly think of anything he wants to do. No goals and no aspirations, except maybe having a beautiful wife by his side, alcohol in unlimited quantity and being entertained by others. Gloria, for her beauty is everything. Her guiding principle is to never do anything for another. You don’t give a damn about me and I don’t give a damn about you – that is her life philosophy in a nutshell. The two are married. They are waiting for an inheritance from Anthony’s grandfather. An inheritance that will give them millions and insure that they need never work or do anything that doesn’t please them. And if that dream comes true, what then?

There is humor to be found in the lines. It is cynical. It is full of irony. Intellectualism is scoffed at. Here follow some examples:
-They were in love with generalities.
-Happiness is only the first seconds after the alleviation of misery.
-I don’t care about truth; I want happiness.
-I don’t want to spend money in driblets.
-His imagination was almost incapable of sustaining a dialog.
-Everyone had something to talk about and they all enjoyed it. (This was about war.)

Not all of the humor is serious though. Try this:
-10 o’clock bumped stuffily into 11.
What I am saying again, in just another way, is that the writing has a style of its own and it is special.

Just so you are warned - the book is a product of its own time. It was published in 1922 and draws the era before and after the First World War. It has racist lines. What is assumed and taken for granted then does not represent how we think today. Well, for most of us.

The audiobook is narrated by William Dufris. He turns this into a theatre production. I would have preferred a simple reading of the lines. He dramatizes; he interprets the text for you. I’d rather think for myself. (My trick for getting around this is to repeat the lines in my head, thereby squashing the narrator’s exasperating intonations.) I have to admit though, that at times he did have me laughing. I kind of got used to the narration; while at the beginning it drove me nuts, by the end I was desensitized.

So what am I thinking as I complete the book? You simply cannot change people! Is that what Fitzgerald wanted to say? I have read that the book is based on his life with Zelda. Is he observing and recording? The book certainly has something to say about work and life goals, but this message is so obvious there has to be more.