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The Beautiful and the Damned

f. scott fitzgerald

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A gripping morality tale, a meditation on love and money, and an acute social statement, The Beautiful and the Damned is a semi-autobiographical depiction of a glamorous, reckless Manhattan couple and their spectacular spiral into tragedy and despair. Newly designed and typeset in a modern 6-by-9-inch format by Waking Lion Press.

348 pages, Paperback

First published March 1,1922
Literary awards
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This edition

Format
348 pages, Paperback
Published
July 6, 2006 by Waking Lion Press
ISBN
9781600962356
ASIN
1600962351
Language
English
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About the author

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f. scott fitzgerald

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Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, widely known simply as Scott Fitzgerald, was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age, a term he popularized in his short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age. During his lifetime, he published four novels, four story collections, and 164 short stories. Although he achieved temporary popular success and fortune in the 1920s, Fitzgerald received critical acclaim only after his death and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.
Born into a middle-class family in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald was raised primarily in New York state. He attended Princeton University where he befriended future literary critic Edmund Wilson. Owing to a failed romantic relationship with Chicago socialite Ginevra King, he dropped out in 1917 to join the United States Army during World War I. While stationed in Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre, a Southern debutante who belonged to Montgomery's exclusive country-club set. Although she initially rejected Fitzgerald's marriage proposal due to his lack of financial prospects, Zelda agreed to marry him after he published the commercially successful This Side of Paradise (1920). The novel became a cultural sensation and cemented his reputation as one of the eminent writers of the decade.
His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), propelled him further into the cultural elite. To maintain his affluent lifestyle, he wrote numerous stories for popular magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's Weekly, and Esquire. During this period, Fitzgerald frequented Europe, where he befriended modernist writers and artists of the "Lost Generation" expatriate community, including Ernest Hemingway. His third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), received generally favorable reviews but was a commercial failure, selling fewer than 23,000 copies in its first year. Despite its lackluster debut, The Great Gatsby is now hailed by some literary critics as the "Great American Novel". Following the deterioration of his wife's mental health and her placement in a mental institute for schizophrenia, Fitzgerald completed his final novel, Tender Is the Night (1934).
Struggling financially because of the declining popularity of his works during the Great Depression, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood, where he embarked upon an unsuccessful career as a screenwriter. While living in Hollywood, he cohabited with columnist Sheilah Graham, his final companion before his death. After a long struggle with alcoholism, he attained sobriety only to die of a heart attack in 1940, at 44. His friend Edmund Wilson edited and published an unfinished fifth novel, The Last Tycoon (1941), after Fitzgerald's death. In 1993, a new edition was published as The Love of the Last Tycoon, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli.

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Community Reviews

Rating(4 / 5.0, 99 votes)
5 stars
34(34%)
4 stars
33(33%)
3 stars
32(32%)
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99 reviews All reviews
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RDEmperorAsh
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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I was initially skeptical about this story – I chose it nearly randomly when presented with the list of titles, as I hadn’t looked up any of them to see what they were. However, after the first chapter, I was engrossed in the story and read it intently through the end. I was slightly disappointed when it ended! I would recommend it, but only to specific audiences mature enough to grasp the concepts, as the story would not carry the same weight. At least to me, had I not had the emotional maturity/experience to understand some more profound meanings.
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Anemone97
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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Iniziamo con il dire che "Belli e dannati" non è affatto un libro scorrevole, in quanto in alcuni punti, è prolisso e ripetitivo, anche a causa del fatto che è una storia statica, in cui sono pochi i colpi di scena.
"Belli e dannati" è il resoconto, la storia di due personaggi, quali Anthony Patch e Gloria Gilbert, nei quali si possono intravedere le figure di Francis Scott Fitzgerald e della moglie, Zelda.
"Belli e dannati" è il crollo delle illusioni, della mancanza di significato della vita, della bellezza effimera, di una America che si basa sulla sostanza e molte serate spese tra alcool e feste, come sono soliti trascorrerle i due protagonisti.
In questa opera, Fitzgerald si rivela molto abile a raccontare il vissuto di entrambi i personaggi, a farci vivere il dolore, il decadimento umano e morale, la decadenza e la digressione di due giovani, belli sì, ma dannati, deteriorati nel corpo e nell'anima, a causa del denaro, come racconta anche la Pivano nella prefazione al romanzo.
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Aust1n
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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Maybe 2.5. I didn't love this one. It felt messy and poorly structured in comparison with The Great Gatsby, and the characters really didn't grab me.
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kingofranger
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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The Beautiful and Damned: http://readwithstyle.wordpress.com/20...

F. Scott Fitzgerald defined the Jazz Age as a ‘generation grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken’. His second novel The Beautiful and Damned continuous the exploration of that ‘lost generation’ and is largely inspired by his troublesome marriage with Zelda. To me, The Beautiful and Damned seems the most depressing of all of his novels. The general atmosphere of futility, waste, lack of purpose is overwhelming. The feeling that there is no point in doing anything is almost painful. In his second novel Fitzgerald is already at his best – skillfully portraying a generation of decay, where the cult towards pleasure and money has destroyed morality.

Read more: http://readwithstyle.wordpress.com/20...
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OnyLink
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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I read about Fitzgerald's life afterwards and I realized that Gloria and Anthony were heavily inspired by Zelda and him. That is heartbreaking, but also brutally honest if it's true. The ending was fitting and kinda unexpected, the story was depressing, but it depicted the war-post-war jazz era realistically and without restraint and embellishments.
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CthulhuTheGreat
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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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.
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TinyButMighty
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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I found the introduction (written by Pagan Harleman) to be helpful and accurate - this novel is not a perfect work of art. However, it is truly original, as Fitzgerald incorporates and mixes different styles of writing; I understand why it is a classic.

I additionally found it fascinating to monitor how some of the characters would parallel Fitzgerald’s personal life in their downfall. I consider the dialogue to be the strongest point of this book.

It is truly enticing to be able to witness the deterioration of a character, which this novel portrays best. The language is beautiful - my vocabulary has been expanded. Fitzgerald is a literary master.
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