Beautiful and Damned (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Free

the first of a series of stories based on Fitzgerald’s youth. The family moves again to Paris, where Zelda’s ballet training damages her health and leads to marital problems. The family returns to Delaware in the fall.
1929
Once again the family goes back to Europe. Zelda publishes “The Original Follies Girl” in College Humor. The American stock market crashes, and the Great Depression begins.
1930
In April, Zelda suffers the first of a series of nervous breakdowns and is admitted to a Paris clinic. In May, she goes to a sanatorium in Switzerland where she is diagnosed as schizophrenic.
1931
Fitzgerald travels alone to America to attend his father’s funeral. He accepts an offer from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) to work on a screenplay in Hollywood. He returns to Europe and travels between Paris and Switzerland. In July the Swiss sanatorium releases Zelda. The Fitzgerald family returns to America in September. In December, Fitzgerald goes alone to Hollywood to work for Metro-GoldwynMayer.
1932
Zelda suffers another collapse and is hospitalized in Baltimore. She will be an inpatient or an outpatient at a sanatorium for the rest of her life. Fitzgerald moves to Baltimore to join his wife. Zelda publishes an autobiographical novel, Save Me the Waltz, completed in the clinic.
1933
Prohibition ends. Adolf Hitler becomes chancellor of Germany.
Gertrude Stein publishes The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
1934
Zelda suffers a third breakdown and returns to the Baltimore clinic. Fitzgerald publishes Tender Is the Night, a novel about a psychiatrist in Europe who marries one of his patients and eventually unravels. Henry Miller publishes Tropic of Cancer in France.
1935
Taps at Reveille, Fitzgerald’s fourth short-story collection, is published. He moves back and forth between Baltimore, New York, and North Carolina.
1936
Fitzgerald’s confessional “Crack-Up” essays, which describe his sense of emotional depletion, appear in Esquire.
1937
Financially strained, Fitzgerald accepts a lucrative scriptwriting contract with MGM. In December, the six-month contract is renewed for one year. He starts writing the screenplay for Three Comrades, his only script to make it to film. He begins an affair with gossip columnist Sheilah Graham that will last until his death.
1939
Fitzgerald, whose MGM contract was not renewed at the end of 1938, starts work on a screenplay for United Artists but is fired after a drinking binge. Later that year he works as a freelance screenwriter in Hollywood. He starts The Last Tycoon, a novel about life in Hollywood. He is hospitalized twice following drinking bouts. World War II begins.
1940
With The Last Tycoon only half finished, F. Scott Fitzgerald dies of a heart attack on December 21, in Graham’s Hollywood apartment. He is buried in the Rockville Union Cemetery in Maryland.
1941
The Last Tycoon is published.
1945
The Crack-Up is published.
1948
Zelda Fitzgerald dies in a fire at a hospital in North Carolina.

INTRODUCTION
    F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Beautiful and Damned, his second book, when he was only twenty-five. It was published in 1922, just as the Jazz Age was beginning to hit its stride. The war was over, the economy was booming, the skyscrapers were rising, the flappers were vamping, the alcohol was flowing (despite Prohibition), the music was swinging, and the party appeared to be never-ending. America was, as Fitzgerald later said, “going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history and there was going to be plenty to tell about it” (The Crack-Up, with Other Pieces and Stories, p. 59; see “For Further Reading”). Who better to chronicle the splendor of this new age than Fitzgerald, the man who since the rip-roaring success of his first novel had been called its most notorious voice?
    Although he was the poster boy for this extravagant age, with his second book Fitzgerald chose to focus not on the splendor of the era, but instead on its spoils, the ugly aftermath of the party.