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• The Beautiful and Damned
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Digireads.com, 2008 - 228 pages

average customer review:based on 60 reviews
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   highly recommended  highly recommended



My favorite of his novels.

Some readers discover Fitzgerald by accident, by reputation or, perhaps in school. My exposure came via the first possibility through a worn paperback copy of 'The Crack Up' soon afterward I read a paperback semi-bio called 'Crazy Sundays, F Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood'. This was in the early Seventies and at that time I couldn't find anything in print and only found his books at yard sales and used book stores. I read Gatsby, Tender is the Night and even a collection of short stories reprinted from Fitzgerald's magazine writing. Now, over thirty years later I have re-read many of those books and I find his short stories mildly enjoyable and his novels, flowery and antique. Sure, you might say, they are old books however, I re-read my other favorites from my Seventies bookshelf: Sinclair Lewis and Mark Twain and find that their styles have aged very well by comparison (and of the two, only Lewis can be considered a contemporary, Twain is even older). What does this have to do this novel? It holds-up the best in the ways that his work generally has not held-up. Perhaps it's the themes or the biographical elements but either way, this book deserves a look if you have already read his other novels and are giving up on him!


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Great Book for any Fitzgerald Fan!

Great book for any Fitzgerald fan! This was my guide to living life in my twenties, lol! I've heard it called a hard book to read, and I can see that. But there is great satisfaction upon finishing the book. I guarantee it!









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Hidden Treasure in the Shadow of Gatsby. . .

The American reading public seems to reduce `classic authors' to one-hit wonders: The Stranger, Catcher in the Rye, Vanity Fair, Frankenstein, Catch-22, Oedipus the King, etc. One great work seems to exhaust us and we move on. The only real exceptions are situations in which the author has two great works of moral equivalency: Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four, Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Iliad and The Odyssey.

A victim of the one-book limit on our memories is The Beautiful and Damned. No, it's not as good as The Great Gatsby. But then again -- to paraphrase Joseph Heller -- neither is any other American novel. If it weren't for Jay Gatsby, however, this other work by F. Scott Fitzgerald would likely get suggested more often as `the Great American Novel'.

I was blown away by it. The novel is divided into roughly three parts, following the third decade of life of a useless Harvard alum living in New York City named Anthony Comstock Patch. The first period is youthful exuberance. It reads like it was written by a kid who woke up one day being after being anointed the Chosen One by the gods of literature. It's got this `Wow, I can write beautiful prose about anything!' euphoria to it. The prose dazzles and sparkles as it careens from one pointless bit to another as it lampoons the East Coast elite. It shifts tenses for no reason, abruptly goes into the format of a play for couple of pages at a stretch and generally dances its way through the nonadventures of several extremely wealthy young men. The words on the page are relentless brilliant. Even getting up to leave is memorable: `Anthony arose and punched himself into his overcoat. . .'

This first section is hilarious. Typically, when I discover something from before WWII that was meant to be humorous, I cringe to myself because it's so not funny. The opening of this book, after a slightly dry description of Anthony Patch's familial background, satirizes the wealthy, their pretensions, their sense of entitlement, their superiority, with unerring accuracy. It's laugh-out-loud funny but never mean-spirited.

I hate spoilers. Suffice to say that the second and third sections get uglier as relationships get more serious. What we forgive in the young we find more disappointing in people as they age. (A Peter Pan with a puffy-eyed hangover at thirty is not a pretty sight.) The prose loses little momentum as the story flirts with disaster.

In addition to the writing itself, what really struck me was how Fitzgerald could create a sense of empathy for such appalling characters. If Anthony Patch was a real person, he'd be the poster boy for Marxism. Yet Fitzgerald can get us to care about him and his ilk, people who are in truth little more than lazy, absentmindedly racist, decidedly misogynistic alcoholic snobs. (Indeed, this novel could be read as the parable about the consequences of misogyny on men.) If someone told me that it would be possible to write a novel in which you feel for a character who jokes about kicking a kitten -- we're left hoping it was a joke -- I would have said it was impossible, but there you have it.

The novel also makes the time period covered, from shortly before WWI to the Roaring Twenties, come vividly alive. Anthony Patch becomes the embodiment of America, starting in innocence, becoming disillusioned with war and ending in the boozy disillusionment of Prohibition. (And no, that's not really a spoiler.) It's not simply Anthony: the novel is animated by consumer products of the period, suggests a critique of suburbia forty years head of its time and is filled with fascination with those new technologies, the car and the feature-length film.

In short, The Beautiful and Damned probably offers more per page than just about any other novel you might read. Except The Great Gatsby.

This review is based on an out of print hardback from the library, not this particular edition.


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the title says it all

The Beautiful and Damned is Fitzgerald's second novel and the title says it all.Anthony Patch and Gloria Gilbert are two self asorbed people who desire romantic love and they fall in love with each other. They have no desire for productive work and they desire lives of luxury. They receive allowances from their parents and Anthonys grandfather gives a little as well but Anthony has no desire to wotk and Gloria is obsessed with being an actress which irritates Anthony. Both are alcoholics which adds fuel to their self destructive situation. In the end ,Anthony becomes wealthy winning 30 million dollars by challenging hsi grandfathers will he is stricken from it despite being the only direct descendant but the money makes neither he or his wife happy. Their narcissism combines to damn them to misery despite their exterior beauty of which their wealth is a large part of.At times the book rambles into clever phrases that have no point and it is too loose at times but it is still a book worth reading though not quite as good as This Side of Paradise


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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10



First published in Scribner's Magazine in 1922, "The Beautiful and Damned" is F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel. It is the story of Anthony Patch, a socialite and heir to a fortune, and his relationship with his wife Gloria. The novel addresses a theme common to Fitzgerald's work, that being the moral decline and directionless lethargy that had consumed the American upper class. A brilliant and tragic character study that explores the intricacies of married life, "The Beautiful and Damned" is believed to be largely based on Fitzgerald's own relationship with his wife Zelda.


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