The Beautiful and Damned

The Beautiful and Damned is F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel. It explores and portrays New York caf society and the American Eastern elite during the Jazz Age before and after "the Great War" and in the early 1920s. Fitzgerald's characters are complex, especially with respect to marriage and intimacy. A tale of morality, a meditation on love, money and decadence, and a social documentary. It concerns the characters' disproportionate appreciation of and focus on their past, which tends to consume them in the present. The novel is generally considered to have drawn upon Fitzgerald's relationship and marriage with his wife Zelda Fitzgerald.