The Beautiful and Damned


The Beautiful and Damned, first published by Scribner's in 1922, is F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel. It explores and portrays New York café society and the American Eastern elite during the Jazz Age before and after the Great War in the early 1920s. As in his other novels, Fitzgerald's characters in this novel are complex, materialistic and experience significant disruptions in respect to classism, marriage, and intimacy. The work generally is considered to be based on Fitzgerald's relationship and marriage with his wife Zelda Fitzgerald.

Plot summary

The Beautiful and Damned tells the story of Anthony Patch in 1910s New York, a socialite and presumptive heir to a tycoon's fortune; his complicated marriage to Gloria Gilbert; the couple's troubling experience with wealth and status; his brief service in the Army during World War I; and Anthony and Gloria's journey through alcoholism and partying. Gloria and Anthony's story deals with the hardships of a relationship, especially when they are each pitted against the other's selfish attitudes. Once the couple's infatuation with each other fades, they begin to see their differences that do more harm than good, as well as leaving each other with some unfulfilled hopes.
Toward the end of the novel, Fitzgerald summarizes the plot and his intentions in writing it, even referring to his own first novel, when a financially successful writer friend tells Anthony:

Major characters

The Beautiful and Damned has been described as a morality tale, a meditation on love, money and decadence, and a social documentary. It concerns the characters' disproportionate appreciation of and focus on their past, which tends to consume them in the present. The theme of absorption in the past also continues through much of Fitzgerald's later works, perhaps best summarized in the final line of his 1925 novel The Great Gatsby: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past", which is inscribed on Fitzgerald's tombstone shared with Zelda in Maryland.
According to Fitzgerald critic James West, The Beautiful and Damned is concerned with the question of 'vocation'—what does one do with oneself when one has nothing to do? Fitzgerald presents Gloria as a woman whose vocation is nothing more than to catch a husband. After her marriage to Anthony, Gloria's sole vocation is to slide into indulgence and indolence, while her husband's sole vocation is to wait for his inheritance, during which time he slides into depression and alcoholism.

Publication history

Fitzgerald wrote The Beautiful and Damned quickly in the winter and spring of 1921–22 while Zelda was pregnant with their daughter, following editorial suggestions from his friend Edmund Wilson and his editor Max Perkins. Chapters of the book were serialized in Metropolitan Magazine in late 1921, and in March 1922, the book was published. Following his best-selling This Side of Paradise, Scribner's prepared an initial print run of 20,000 copies, and mounted an advertising campaign. It sold well enough to warrant additional print runs reaching 50,000 copies.
Fitzgerald dedicated the novel to the Irish writer Shane Leslie, George Jean Nathan, and Maxwell Perkins "in appreciation of much literary help and encouragement".
Originally called by Fitzgerald The Flight of the Rocket as a working-title, he had divided it pre-publication into three major parts: "The Pleasant Absurdity of Things", "The Romantic Bitterness of Things", and "The Ironic Tragedy of Things". As published, however, it consists of three, untitled "Books" of three chapters each:
The first book tells the story of the first meeting and courtship of a beautiful and spoiled couple, Anthony and Gloria, madly in love, with Gloria ecstatically exclaiming: "mother says that two souls are sometimes created together—and in love before they're born."
Book two covers the first three years of their married life together, with Anthony and Gloria vowing to adhere to
The final book recounts Anthony's disinheritance, just as the U.S. enters World War I; his year in the army while Gloria remains home alone until his return; and the couple's rapid, final decline into alcoholism, dissolution and ruin – "to the syncopated beat of the Jazz Age".
At the end, Anthony Patch shows some of the same revisionism as his grandfather in the opening chapter, describing his great wealth as a necessary consequence of his character rather than to circumstance. Fitzgerald writing in the closing lines of the novel:

Reception

Louise Field, in The New York Times, found the novel showed Fitzgerald to be talented but too pessimistic, and hoped he "will some day acquire a less one-sided understanding".

Adaptations

A film adaptation in 1922, directed by William A. Seiter, starred Kenneth Harlan as Anthony Patch and Marie Prevost as Gloria.
There is a French and a German translation.
Musician G-Eazy titled one album after the novel and based a number of the song concepts on what was going on in the book and in his life.