Few writers have been as successful as F. Scott Fitzgerald in conveying autobiographical materials into literary art. The Beautiful and Damned transforms the now-familiar stories about F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s early marriage--the scandalous public behaviour, the nights of drunken revelry and days darkened by the ever-present shadow of insurmountable debt - into a captivating work of fiction.

Anthony Patch ‘one of those many with tastes and weaknesses of an artist but with no actual creative inspiration’ and the beautiful, flirtatious Gloria, are newly married. Anticipating an inheritance from Anthony’s family, they embrace a style of life far beyond their means. In chronicling their decline--moral, physical, and financial--and offering a grimly ironic twist at the end, Fitzgerald created a satirical yet poignant portrait of the generation he and his work would define, not only for his contemporaries, but for all future readers.