The Beautiful and Damned

The glittering portrait of a couple drunk on privilege—and on each other.

Fitzgerald followed the success of This Side of Paradise with something more ambitious, more biting, and altogether more personal. He began drafting The Beautiful and Damned in 1920, not long after marrying Zelda Sayre. The two had become the golden couple of the Jazz Age—celebrated, envied, and increasingly volatile. Their lavish lifestyle, whirlwind romance, and growing disillusionment with fame and fortune echoed in every page of his second novel.

He serialized it in Metropolitan Magazine before its 1922 release through Scribner’s, hoping to cement his place in the literary elite. But what readers got wasn’t just another decadent romp—it was a warning shot. Fitzgerald’s prose shimmered as always, but underneath the glitter lay exhaustion, rot, and the slow undoing of a dream.

The Story

Anthony Patch is young, handsome, and rich—or will be, once he inherits his grandfather’s fortune. In the meantime, he studies idleness like an art form and marries the beautiful and sharp-witted Gloria Gilbert, a woman as magnetic and restless as he is. Together, they throw parties, drink away their youth, and chase the illusion of purpose in a society that demands nothing of them but spectacle.

But beneath the champagne bubbles, something festers. The marriage grows toxic, the fortune grows uncertain, and the mirage of eternal glamour begins to fade. What unfolds is a devastating portrait of two people unraveling in tandem—bound by love, undone by ambition, and haunted by the slow realization that charm and wealth are no match for time.

A brutal, glittering critique of privilege without direction, The Beautiful and Damned is Fitzgerald at his most confessional—equal parts love letter and eulogy to a life lived too fast.