The Beautiful and Damned, first published 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...More
Born on December 21, 1940, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and short-story writer. He was best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age—a term which he coined. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century and he received wide critical and popular acclaim after his death. His novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), was inspired by his rise to fame and relationship with Zelda. The Great Gatsby is now widely praised, with some even labeling it the "Great American Novel".
Born on December 21, 1940, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and short-story writer. He was best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age—a term which he coined. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century and he received wide critical and popular acclaim after his death. His novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), was inspired by his rise to fame and relationship with Zelda. The Great Gatsby is now widely praised, with some even labeling it the "Great American Novel".
Book Summary
The Beautiful and Damned, first published 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.
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.