The Beautiful and the Damned annotated

The Beautiful and Damned is F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel. Another classic Jazz Age novel, taking place in New York City and exploring the romance of the twenties.This edition includes an introduction and the original New York Times review. Expertly formatted with a linked table of contents. Look for more classic books from Green Light.Visit us at - GreenLighteBooks.tumblr.comTwitter - @GreenLightbooks and facebook.com/greenlightbooksThis novel is more interesting as an historical record of the Jazz Age (as Fitzgerald intended it) than as literature. It shows how Fitzgerald's facility with words gets him lost in the absence of any theme. He clearly dislikes this couple, but while he manages to give much insight into how their minds work, there doesn't seem to be any alternative in this artificial world he plants them in, and the absence of any clear moral perspective seems to drive an ultimately unsatisfying ending, part deus ex machina and part tragedy. We recognize these people in our lives to the extent that we live lives with access to that kind of money, but meanwhile, the kind of structural perfection crafted in the Great Gatsby is missing here. Instead, we have a narrator who seems unsure about what it means to be a writer but confident of his own gifts. He tends to celebrate decadence, however, without recognizing sincere or authentic existence as a possibility. It explains the author's own unhappy ending to a self-destructive path in terms of his judgment during these episodes, not their reason for warranting a novel. He wrote it to make money, and he figured his audience would rather follow the latest trends than to lead society forward. A waste of talent.