The Beautiful and Damned

The Beautiful and Damned is a novel by the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1922. It was his second novel, following This Side of Paradise, and it fixed his reputation as a writer about the wealth and behaviour of his own generation.

The book follows Anthony Patch and Gloria Gilbert from their meeting through the first years of their marriage in New York. Anthony has an allowance, an expectation of a much larger inheritance and no particular occupation beyond wanting to be an aesthete, and Gloria is beautiful, spoiled and used to being admired. Their early life together is a round of parties, restaurants and late nights, financed by credit and the anticipation of money that has not arrived, and the novel follows what the habit of living that way does to two people who have no interest in earning anything. Fitzgerald wrote the book while his own marriage to Zelda Fitzgerald was in its early years, and the couple at the centre of it are closely modelled on the two of them.

Its subject is the idle rich of the mid-1910s, and its interest is in the way a life with no necessity in it can be spent rather than built.