The Beautiful and Damned

Anthony Patch expects to inherit a fortune, and in the meantime he and his dazzling wife Gloria fill their days with parties, drink, and the settled belief that money will arrive before it is truly needed. Fitzgerald’s second novel, published in 1922, follows the slow ruin of that assumption as idleness curdles into resentment, beauty fades, and the couple wait out the years in mounting bitterness. Set among the wealth and glitter of Jazz Age New York, it is a hard look at a marriage and a class corroded by leisure and expectation. Semi-autobiographical and unsparing, it stands as one of his sharpest studies of American excess. Free to download here as a PDF and EPUB edition.