The publication of The Beautiful and Damned confirmed F. Scott Fitzgerald's place in the pantheon of great American writers. The story chronicles the courtship, fraught marriage, and social demise of Anthony Patch, the presumptive heir to a tycoon's fortune, and Gloria Gilbert, a ravishing society girl. Brilliant and scathing, it is a dazzling tale of lost youth and dissipation that spares no one--least of all the protagonists who resemble, in substance if not circumstance, Fitzgerald himself and his charismatic, capricious, wife, Zelda. This vivid portrait of a corrupt, rootless, and boozy age anticipates Fitzgerald's masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, and signals his fascination with the themes that would continue to animate his work.