The Beautiful and Damned

Introduction by Hortense Calisher Commentary by Edmund Wilson, Henry Seidel Canby, and Arthur Mizener

Fitzgerald’s second novel, a devastating portrait of the excesses of the Jazz Age, is a largely autobiographical depiction of a glamorous, reckless Manhattan couple and their spectacular spiral into tragedy. Published on the heels of This Side of Paradise, the story of the Harvard-educated aesthete Anthony Patch and his willful wife, Gloria, is propelled by Fitzgerald’s inten…