The Beautiful and Damned

The Beautiful and Damned is a 1922 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in New York City, the novel's plot follows a young artist Anthony Comstock Patch and his flapper wife, Gloria Gilbert, who wreck themselves "on the shoals of dissipation" while partying to excess at the dawn of the Jazz Age. As Fitzgerald's sophomore novel, the work focuses on the swinish behavior and glittering excesses of the American idle rich in the mid-1910s heyday of New York's café society. Fitzgerald loosely modeled the young libertine characters of Anthony Comstock Patch on himself and Gloria Gilbert on his newlywed spouse Zelda Fitzgerald. The novel draws on the early years of Fitzgerald's disappointing marriage in New York City after the meteoric success of the author's first novel, This Side of Paradise. At the time of their wedding in 1920, Fitzgerald claimed neither he nor Zelda loved each other, and the early years of their marriage resembled a friendship. Mindful of the criticisms leveled at his debut novel This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald sought in The Beautiful and Damned to improve on the form and structure of his writing and to venture into the different fictional genre of literary realism. His work traces the Hogarthian descent of "lovely young creatures" and "millionaires" into ruin amid the death throes of an old America and the turbulent birth of a new one. In Fitzgerald's view, the "beautiful and damned" of New York's café society were no less fated to destruction than the peasants in Thomas Hardy's bleak novels. He revised his second novel based on suggestions from his friend Edmund Wilson and his editor Max Perkins. When reviewing the revised manuscript, Perkins commended the conspicuous evolution of Fitzgerald's literary craftsmanship. The novel sold well but received mixed reviews. Metropolitan serialized the work in late 1921, and Scribner's published it in March 1922 in an initial printing of 20,000 copies. Although it did not become a top-ten best-seller, its strong sales led to a second printing of 50,000 copies. Many critics expected more of the carefree gaiety of This Side of Paradise, and the novel's bleak pessimism surprised them. While certain critics lamented that Fitzgerald had traded the bubbly giddiness of This Side of Paradise for "the bitter dregs of reality", others such as John V. A. Weaver and H. L. Mencken praised Fitzgerald's improved craftsmanship and believed he would achieve greatness with his third work. Weaver predicted that, as Fitzgerald matured as a writer, he would come to be regarded as one of the greatest authors in American literature. Later scholars deem the work to be among Fitzgerald's lesser novels. One month after The Beautiful and Damned's publication, humorist Burton Rascoe suggested that Scott's wife, Zelda, write a satirical newspaper review containing sensational claims as a publicity stunt to boost sales. Although Zelda proofread drafts of her husband's novel and consented to the quotation of her letters in the work, she pretended in her tongue-in-cheek review to read the novel for the first time and jested about plagiarism. As a consequence of Rascoe's mischievous publicity stunt, speculation emerged decades later that Zelda co-authored the novel and collaborated on Fitzgerald's other works. The consensus among Fitzgerald scholars is that no evidence supports these claims.