F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The beautiful and damned"

"F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, has in the century since its publication in 1922 been dismissed as an outlier and curiosity in his oeuvre. At best, it has been viewed as a transitional work, a stepping-stone from the coming-of-age plot of This Side of Paradise to The Great Gatsby's masterful critique of American aspiration. To date, there has never been a scholarly collection devoted specifically to it, even though at 449 pages it is Fitzgerald's longest work with the broadest scope. The Beautiful and Damned belongs to a genre that is widely misunderstood: the "bright young things" novel in which spoiled and wealthy characters succumb to decay because of their privilege and lack of purpose. Set between 1913 and 1922, the novel touches on many of the decisive issues that mark the passage from the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era into the Jazz Age: conspicuous consumption, income inequality, metropolitan life versus the emergence of the suburbs, yellow journalism, the Great War, antebellum nostalgia, the rise of the movie industry, automobile travel, Wall Street stock scams and America's relentless culture of snake-oil salesmanship, immigration and xenophobia, and the fixation with youth and aging. Published to coincide with the novel's centennial in 2022, this collection sets out to dissect The Beautiful and Damned for its insights more than its faults. A lineup of prominent Fitzgerald scholars draw from a variety of critical approaches, analyzing both the major themes and unappreciated issues through history, biography, literary influence and development, gender studies, and narratology. While not apologizing for the novel's faults, the essays insist that The Beautiful and Damned has much more to say about its milieu than previously recognized. This collection provides readers a guide for understanding Fitzgerald's aims while establishing the critical agenda for future studies. The essays demonstrate the richness of ideas that this 1922 novel explores and the anxieties and ambitions that reverberate within it"--