![]() ![]() Published to coincide with the novel’s centennial in 2022, this collection approaches The Beautiful and Damned for its insights more than its faults. ![]() Set between 19, Fitzgerald’s longest novel touches on many of the decisive issues that mark the passage from the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era into the Jazz Age: conspicuous consumption, income inequality, yellow journalism, the Great War, the rise of the movie industry, automobile travel, Wall Street stock scams, immigration and xenophobia, and the fixation with youth and aging. ![]() The Beautiful and Damned belongs to a genre that is widely misunderstood, the “bright young things” novel in which spoiled and wealthy characters succumb to decay because of their privilege and lack of purpose. Scott Fitzgerald’s second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, has frequently been dismissed as an outlier and curiosity in his oeuvre, a transitional work from the coming-of-age plot of This Side of Paradise to the masterful critique of American aspiration in The Great Gatsby. ![]()
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