The Beautiful and Damned

Anthony and Gloria Patch, would-be Jazz Age aristocrats, embody the corruption and excess of 1920s New York: beautiful, shallow, pleasure-seeking, and vain. As presumptive heirs to a vast fortune, they begin married life living far beyond their means, their days consumed with drinking, dancing, luxury, and play. But when the expected inheritance fails to materialize, their lives turn into a relentless pursuit of wealth, and their once-unbreakable alliance begins to unravel.

Partly inspired by Fitzgerald’s own turbulent marriage to Zelda, this novel renders a hauntingly vivid portrait of a lost world: a city steeped in vice, a society adrift, and a rootless, decadent generation caught in its own glittering excess.