The Beautiful and Damned

In the early twentieth-century, Anthony Patch, a socialite and presumptive heir to a tycoon's fortune, finds himself falling madly in love with another socialite. Self-absorbed and vain, Gloria Gilbert jumps at the chance to marry Anthony, and the pair embark on a downward spiral that illustrates their selfishness and leaves them both unfulfilled. Surrounded by the glitz and the glam of the 1910s, the characters portrayed in this American novel weave a tale of morality and is critical of love, money, and decadence. Drawing upon his own troubled marriage to Zelda Sayres, Fitzgerald paints a picture of the realities and hardships of a relationship where the two members tend towards selfishness and alcoholism.