Fiction · 1922
The Beautiful and Damned
Anthony Patch has a Harvard degree, a small fortune of his own, and a much larger one coming to him someday from his grandfather — and no particular reason to do anything with any of it. He marries Gloria Gilbert, the most sought-after beauty in New York, and the two of them settle into a marriage built almost entirely on parties, drinking, and waiting: for the money, for something to happen, for their own beauty and cleverness to add up to a life. Fitzgerald spends three books watching the wait fail to pay off — the war intervenes, the fortune is contested in court, the drinking stops being decorative — and ends the novel exactly where its title says it will.
It is Fitzgerald's second novel, written at twenty-five and published complete on 4 March 1922, after a six-month serialization in Metropolitan Magazine; Scribner's Max Perkins edited it, and the book is dedicated to Perkins along with Shane Leslie and George Jean Nathan. Where This Side of Paradise had been a young man's novel about being young, this one is a young man's novel about watching youth curdle — colder, funnier in places, and considerably harder on its two leads than anything Fitzgerald had written before.
Bibliomancer restores the 1922 Scribner's text exactly as Fitzgerald wrote it.
Contents
- Epigraph
- Book One
- Chapter I — Anthony Patch
- Chapter II — Portrait of a Siren
- Chapter III — The Connoisseur of Kisses
- Book Two
- Chapter I — The Radiant Hour
- Chapter II — Symposium
- Chapter III — The Broken Lute
- Book Three
- Chapter I — A Matter of Civilization
- Chapter II — A Matter of Aesthetics
- Chapter III — No Matter!
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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About the author
1896–1940 · Modern
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) was born in St Paul, Minnesota, and attended Princeton without graduating. His first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), made him famous at twenty-three; he married Zelda Sayre a week after it appeared. The Beautiful and Damned (1922), The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934) followed, with many short stories for magazines. He spent his last years writing for Hollywood and died there at forty-four, leaving The Last Tycoon unfinished.
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