The Beautiful and Damned

Twenty-five-year-old Anthony Patch appears to have it all: a Harvard education, an apartment in New York City, memberships at all of the best clubs, and a generous trust fund to draw from. His grandfather is not happy with Anthony’s feckless lifestyle, but can Anthony be blamed knowing that, as an orphan, he is destined to be the sole heir to his grandfather’s immense fortune? When Anthony is introduced to the beautiful Gloria Gilbert, whose hedonism rivals his own, he is so smitten that he proposes marriage. Gloria accepts--and so begins the downward spiral of their lives. While their friends prosper, Anthony and Gloria live recklessly, outspending their assets and squandering their good fortune. Will they find the fortitude to change course and recover from the humiliating depths into which they’ve descended?

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. He attended Princeton University, joined the United States Army during World War I, and published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920. That same year he married Zelda Sayre, and for the next decade the couple lived in New York, Paris, and on the French Riviera. Fitzgerald’s masterpieces include The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender is the Night. He died at the age of forty-four while working on The Last Tycoon. Fitzgerald’s fiction has secured his reputation as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century.