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Look Inside | Reading Guide
Reading Guide
Aug 10, 2010 | ISBN 9780307476357 Buy
Feb 12, 2002 | ISBN 9780375759642 Buy
Feb 23, 2011 | ISBN 9780307779212 Buy
Aug 19, 2009 | ISBN 9780307414908 Buy
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Aug 10, 2010 | ISBN 9780307476357
Feb 12, 2002 | ISBN 9780375759642
Feb 23, 2011 | ISBN 9780307779212
Aug 19, 2009 | ISBN 9780307414908
F. 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. 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. As presumptive heirs to a large fortune, they begin their married life by living well beyond their means. Their days are marked by endless drinking, dancing, luxury, and play. But when the expected inheritance is withheld, their lives become consumed with the pursuit of wealth, and their alliance begins to fall apart. 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.
Introduction by Hortense Calisher Commentary by Edmund Wilson, Henry Seidel Canby, and Arthur Mizener 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. Published on the heels of This Side of Paradise, the story of the Harvard-educated aesthete Anthony Patch and his willful wife, Gloria, is propelled by Fitzgerald’s intense romantic imagination and demonstrates an increased technical and emotional maturity. The Beautiful and Damned is at once a gripping morality tale, a rueful meditation on love, marriage, and money, and an acute social document. As Hortense Calisher observes in her Introduction, “Though Fitzgerald can entrance with stories so joyfully youthful they appear to be safe—when he cuts himself, you will bleed.”Includes a Modern Library Reading Group Guide
F. Scott Fitzgerald was considered the quintessential author of the Jazz Age. Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896, Fitzgerald attended Princeton University, where he began to write seriously. After joining the U.S. Army in 1917, Fitzgerald met Zelda Sayre, whom… More about F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Full of precisely observed life.” —Arthur Mizener
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