The Beautiful and Damned

<p><strong>The classic novel of greed and vice from F. Scott Fitzgerald.</strong></p> <p>Set in an era of intoxicating excitement and ruinous excess, changing manners and challenged morals, F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel chronicles the lives of Harvard-educated Anthony Patch and his beautiful, willful wife, Gloria. This bitingly ironic story eerily foretells the fate of the author and his own wife, Zelda&mdash;from its giddy romantic beginnings to its alcohol-fueled demise. A portrait of greed, ambition, and squandered talent, <em>The Beautiful and Damned</em> depicts an America embarked on the greatest spree in its history, a world Fitzgerald saw "with clearer eyes than any of his contemporaries."* By turns hilarious, heartbreaking, and chillingly prophetic, it remains one of his best-known works, which Gertrude Stein correctly predicted "will be read when many of his well-known contemporaries are forgotten."</p> <p>*Tobias Wolff</p>