Beautiful and Damned (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him. Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a sort of intellectual “There!”—yet at the brink of this story he has as yet gone no further than the conscious stage.

(page 7)

 

He found his way slowly over the jostled evening mass of Times Square, which the chariot-race and its thousand satellites made rarely beautiful and bright and intimate with carnival. Faces swirled about him, a kaleidoscope of girls, ugly, ugly as sin—too fat, too lean, yet floating upon this autumn air as upon their own warm and passionate breaths poured out into the night. Here, for all their vulgarity, he thought, they were faintly and subtly mysterious. He inhaled carefully, swallowing into his lungs perfume and the not unpleasant scent of many cigarettes.

(page 24)

 

“Here I sit, young Anthony, as I’ll sit for a generation or more and watch such gay souls as you and Dick and Gloria Gilbert go past me, dancing and singing and loving and hating one another and being moved, being eternally moved. And I am moved only by my lack of emotion.”

(page 44)

 

People invariably chose inimitable people to imitate.

(page 71)

 

Between kisses Anthony and this golden girl quarrelled incessantly.

(page 110)

 

“Don’t let the victor belong to the spoils.”

(page 154)

Listlessly Anthony dropped into a chair, his mind tired—tired with nothing, tired with everything, with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear. He was ineffectual and vaguely helpless here as he had always been. One of those personalities who, in spite of all their words, are inarticulate, he seemed to have inherited only the vast tradition of human failure—that, and the sense of death.

(pages 177-178)

 

“They damned the books I read and the things I thought by calling them immoral; later the fashion changed, and they damned things by calling them ‘clever.’”

(page 205)

 

That spring, that summer, they had speculated upon future happiness—how they were to travel from summer land to summer land, returning eventually to a gorgeous estate and possible idyllic children, then entering diplomacy or politics, to accomplish, for a while, beautiful and important things, until finally as a white-haired (beautifully, silkily, white-haired) couple they were to loll about in serene glory, worshipped by the bourgeoisie of the land.

(page 225)

 

“Education’s a great thing, but don’t let it go to your head. Keep on the way you’re doing and you’ll be a good soldier.”

(page 271)

 

“Do you think
I’m
particularly happy?” he continued, ignoring her question. “Do you think I don’t know we’re not living as we ought to?”

(page 303)

 

He turned his blood-shot eyes on her reproachfully—eyes that had once been a deep, clear blue, that were weak now, strained, and half-ruined from reading when he was drunk.

(pages 328-329)

(page 351)

BARNES & NOBLE CLASSICS
NEW YORK

 

Published by Barnes & Noble Books
122 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10011

 

 

The Beautiful and Damned
was first published in 1922.

 

Published in 2005 by Barnes & Noble Classics with new Introduction, Notes,
Biography, Chronology, Inspired By, Comments & Questions,
and For Further Reading.

 

Introduction, Notes, and For Further Reading

Copyright © 2005 by Pagan Harleman.

 

Note on F. Scott Fitzgerald, The World of F. Scott Fitzgerald and
The Beautiful and Damned,
Inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald and
The Beautiful and Damned,
and Comments & Questions
Copyright © 2005 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

 

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and
retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

 

Barnes & Noble Classics and the Barnes & Noble Classics
colophon are trademarks of Barnes & Noble, Inc.

 

ISBN-13: 978-1-59308-245-2 ISBN-10: 1-59308-245-2

eISBN : 978-1-411-43182-9

LC Control Number 2005929201

 

Produced and published in conjunction with:
Fine Creative Media, Inc.
322 Eighth Avenue
New York, NY 10001

 

Michael J. Fine, President and Publisher

 

Printed in the United States of America

 

QM

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

 

FIRST PRINTING

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896, to Edward and Mollie McQuillan Fitzgerald. His father was an unsuccessful businessman who came from an old family with roots in Maryland. His mother was the daughter of an Irish immigrant who built a successful wholesale grocery business in St. Paul. Scott was named after his father’s distant cousin, the author of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and his mother was proud of the family connection to the Keys. Before Scott reached school age his father’s wicker furniture factory had failed, and the family moved to upstate New York to follow Edward’s sales job with Proctor and Gamble. In 1908 Edward lost his position, and the family moved back to St. Paul; from that point on McQuillan money supported them.

At a young age, Scott showed a talent for writing: At thirteen he published his first story in his school journal. In 1911 he transferred to an elite Catholic prep school in New Jersey, where he published three stories in the school’s literary magazine and wrote several plays. Fitzgerald enrolled in Princeton University in 1913, where he contributed to campus magazines and wrote scripts and lyrics for campus musicals. His devotion to extracurricular activities forced him to leave Princeton because of poor grades, although the reason recorded in official records was poor health. After the United States entered World War I, he enlisted in the army; while stationed at a military camp in Kansas, he began writing
The Romantic Egotist,
his first novel.

After the war, Fitzgerald was discharged from the army, never having seen active service. He revised his novel and renamed it
This Side of Paradise;
Charles Scribner’s Sons published it in 1920. That same year Scott married the willful, unpredictable Zelda Sayre, whom he had met several years earlier while stationed at an army base in Alabama. Fitzgerald’s first novel—immensely popular with the war generation—brought him instant fame, although many critics of the day debated its literary merits. He quickly developed notoriety as a carouser and a playboy—impressions he did little to diminish—but his reputation for heavy drinking and continual partying belied his writerly discipline, as evidenced by meticulous revisions of his novels and the numerous short stories he wrote throughout his life. In 1922 he followed his successful debut as a novelist with
The Beautiful and Damned,
a tale about a couple whose lives end in dissipation while they sue for a large inheritance. In his early works Fitzgerald explored a theme he would return to repeatedly: the effects of wealth and power on the people who possess them.