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  • Published: 1 March 2011
  • ISBN: 9780099541493
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 400
  • RRP: $29.99

The Beautiful and Damned




A captivating and glamorous tale of squandered talent that defined 'The Lost Generation' of 1920s New York

Anthony Patch and Gloria Gibson are the golden children of the Jazz Age. They marry and embark on a life of glittering parties, lavish expenditure and scandalous revelry. When the money dries up their marriage founders. In this wistful novel Fitzgerald portrays the decline of youthful promise with devastating clarity.

  • Published: 1 March 2011
  • ISBN: 9780099541493
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 400
  • RRP: $29.99

About the author

F Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 -1940) is widely considered the poet laureate of the Jazz Age. He wrote many short stories and four novels, This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and the Damned, Tender is the Night and The Great Gatsby. An unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, was published posthumously.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in St Paul, Minnesota, and went to Princeton University, which he left in 1917 to join the army. He was said to have epitomized the Jazz Age, which he himself defined as 'a generation grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken'. In 1920 he married Zelda Sayre. Their traumatic marriage and her subsequent breakdowns became the leading influence on his writing. Among his publications were five novels, This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby, The Beautiful and the Damned, Tender is the Night and The Last Tycoon (his last and unfinished work); six volumes of short stories and The Crack Up, a selection of autobiographical pieces.

Fitzgerald died suddenly in 1940. After his death The New York Times said of him that 'He was better than he knew, for in fact and in the literary sense he invented a 'generation'. . . he might have interpreted and even guided them, as in their midle years they saw a different and nobler freedom threatened with destruction.'

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Praise for The Beautiful and Damned

The Jazz Age chronicler's first great novel

The Times

No one has written more elegiacally about America than F. Scott Fitzgerald...a sense of lost time and the irretrievability of the past gave much of his work - indeed, his life - an ineradicable undertone of mourning

Guardian

If Francis Scott Fitzgerald had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent him. Seldom has there been a character who personified, as well as chronicled, an age with such dexterity and verisimilitude

Sunday Times

None was more beautiful, none more damned, than Fitzgerald himself

Independent on Sunday