Fitzgerald\'s second novel, a devastating portrait of the excesses of the Jazz Age, is a largely autobiographical depiction of a glamorous, reckless Manhattan couple and their spectacular spiral into tragedy.
Inspired in part by Fitzgerald\'s own tumultuous union with his wife Zelda, hauntingly rendered and keenly observed, these characters evoke a vivid portrait of a lost world: a city steeped in vice, a society without direction, and the rootless and decadent generation that inhabited it..
But when the expected inheritance is withheld, their lives become consumed with the pursuit of wealth, and their alliance begins to fall apart.
Their days are marked by endless drinking, dancing, luxury, and play.
As presumptive heirs to a large fortune, they begin their married life by living well beyond their means.
Would-be Jazz Age aristocrats Anthony and Gloria Patch embody the corrupt high society of 1920s New York: they are beautiful, shallow, pleasure-seeking, and vain.
Scott Fitzgerald\'s second novel, which brilliantly satirizes a doomed and glamorous marriage, anticipated the master stroke-- The Great Gatsby --that would follow, and marks a key moment in the writer\'s career.
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The Beautiful and Damned is at once a gripping morality tale, a rueful meditation on love, marriage, and money, and an acute social document.
Fitzgerald\'s second novel, a devastating portrait of the excesses of the Jazz Age, is a largely autobiographical depiction of a glamorous, reckless Manhattan couple and their spectacular spiral into tragedy
