The Beautiful and Damned
1922
Fitzgerald's savage, gorgeous portrait of a marriage rotting from within. Anthony Patch, Harvard-educated and heir to a fortune, weds the dazzling Gloria Gilbert, and together they drift through Jazz Age New York in a haze of champagne, recklessness, and mounting self-loathing. They wait for his grandfather's death to fund their dreams, but time moves cruelly: the money never comes fast enough, the drinking never stops, and the beautiful people grow old waiting for the life they deserve. Fitzgerald drew these characters from his own young marriage to Zelda, and the novel bleeds with the terror of watching someone you love become a stranger. This is not nostalgia for the Roaring Twenties. It is an autopsy performed on a generation that mistook pleasure for purpose and found themselves hollow at thirty.
Editions
X-Ray
“Things are sweeter when they're lost. I know--because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.””
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Here's to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.””
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
“I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go””
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
“A woman should be able to kiss a man beautifully and romantically without any desire to be either his wife or his mistress.””
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear.””
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
“She was dazzling-- alight; it was agony to comprehend her beauty in a glance.””
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
“I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.””
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Life is so damned hard, so damned hard... It just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can't be hurt ever any more. That's the last and worst thing it does.””
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
“It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream.””
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
