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The Beautiful and Damned is a 1922 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in New York City, the novel's plot follows a young artist Anthony Patch and his flapper wife Gloria Gilbert who become "wrecked on the shoals of dissipation" while partying to excess at the dawn of the hedonistic Jazz Age. As Fitzgerald's second novel, the work focuses on the swinish behavior and glittering excesses of the American idle rich in the heyday of New York's café society. Fitzgerald modeled the characters of Anthony Patch on himself and Gloria Gilbert on his newlywed spouse Zelda Fitzgerald. The novel draws circumstantially on the early years of the Fitzgeralds tempestuous marriage following the unexpected success of the author's first novel, This Side of Paradise. At the time of their wedding in 1920, Fitzgerald claimed neither he nor Zelda loved each other, and the early years of their marriage in New York City resembled a friendship.
Having reflected upon earlier criticisms of This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald sought to improve on the form and construction of his prose in The Beautiful and Damned and to venture into a new genre of fiction altogether. He revised his second novel based on editorial suggestions from his friend Edmund Wilson and his editor Max Perkins. When reviewing the manuscript, Perkins commended the conspicuous evolution of Fitzgerald's literary craftsmanship.
THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE DAMNED
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