Beautiful and Damned (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (2 page)

After the birth of their daughter, Scottie, the Fitzgeralds lived a peripatetic life for many years, settling in Europe for periods and then residing in America. In Paris Fitzgerald met Ernest Hemingway and other American expatriate writers, whom Gertrude Stein was to dub the “lost generation.”

In 1925 Fitzgerald published his masterpiece,
The Great Gatsby.
Written while the author was living in the French Riviera, the story of the parvenu Jay Gatsby was more a critical success than a financial one, and Fitzgerald continued to support his extravagant lifestyle through frequent, and well-paid, magazine contributions. But his literary fortunes changed following publication of
The Great Gatsby.
Although he published a collection of short stories in 1926, he did not produce another book until 1934, when
Tender Is the Night,
on which he had labored for years, was published. Meanwhile, his domestic life deteriorated as he sank deeper into alcoholism and Zelda became increasingly unstable. Zelda’s emotional collapse in 1930 was precipitated by maniacally intense ballet studies; the remaining years of her life were spent in and out of hospitals.

Tender Is the Night
was a commercial failure and received mixed reviews from the critics. Fitzgerald spent the years following its publication drunk and dissolute; he chronicled this period in the “Crack-Up” essays. As his literary fame diminished, he worked as a Hollywood scriptwriter and wrote short stories; in 1939 he began work on his final novel,
The Last Tycoon,
which detailed Hollywood life. By then he was living with Sheilah Graham, a Hollywood gossip columnist, with whom he would spend the rest of his life. On December 21, 1940, before
The Last Tycoon
was completed, F. Scott Fitzgerald died of a heart attack at the age of forty-four.
The Last Tycoon
was published in 1941; its writing style is considered as fine as the best of Fitzgerald’s other work.

THE WORLD OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD AND
THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote
The Beautiful and Damned,
his second book, when he was only twenty-five. It was published in 1922, just as the Jazz Age was beginning to hit its stride. The war was over, the economy was booming, the skyscrapers were rising, the flappers were vamping, the alcohol was flowing (despite Prohibition), the music was swinging, and the party appeared to be never-ending. America was, as Fitzgerald later said, “going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history and there was going to be plenty to tell about it”
(The Crack-Up, with Other Pieces and Stories,
p. 59; see “For Further Reading”). Who better to chronicle the splendor of this new age than Fitzgerald, the man who since the rip-roaring success of his first novel had been called its most notorious voice?

Although he was the poster boy for this extravagant age, with his second book Fitzgerald chose to focus not on the splendor of the era, but instead on its spoils, the ugly aftermath of the party.
The Beautiful and Damned
is a cautionary tale of a young, insouciant, and irresponsible couple, Anthony and Gloria Patch, and their inevitable downward spiral. In the beginning, they are carefree and happy, buoyed by their love for each other and the hope that Anthony will one day inherit his grandfather’s vast fortune. By the end, they have deteriorated to such an extent that both appear to be bitter, empty shells of their former selves. Gloria has lost her beauty and with it her confidence, and Anthony has metamorphosed into a dissolute drunk who behaves like a child. Theirs is a bleak story without any real promise of redemption.