The Beautiful and Dammed

Zusatztext “Full of precisely observed life.” — Arthur Mizener Informationen zum Autor F. Scott Fitzgerald Klappentext The classic novel of greed and vice from F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in an era of intoxicating excitement and ruinous excess! changing manners and challenged morals! F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel chronicles the lives of Harvard-educated Anthony Patch and his beautiful! willful wife! Gloria. This bitingly ironic story eerily foretells the fate of the author and his own wife! Zelda—from its giddy romantic beginnings to its alcohol-fueled demise. A portrait of greed! ambition! and squandered talent! The Beautiful and Damned depicts an America embarked on the greatest spree in its history! a world Fitzgerald saw "with clearer eyes than any of his contemporaries.”* By turns hilarious! heartbreaking! and chillingly prophetic! it remains one of his best-known works! which Gertrude Stein correctly predicted "will be read when many of his well-known contemporaries are forgotten.” *Tobias Wolff CHAPTER I Anthony Patch 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. As you first see him he wonders frequently whether he is not without honor and slightly mad, a shameful and obscene thinness glistening on the surface of the world like oil on a clean pond, these occasions being varied, of course, with those in which he thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows. This was his healthy state and it made him cheerful, pleasant, and very attractive to intelligent men and to all women. In this state he considered that he would one day accomplish some quiet subtle thing that the elect would deem worthy and, passing on, would join the dimmer stars in a nebulous, indeterminate heaven half-way between death and immortality. Until the time came for this effort he would be Anthony Patch—not a portrait of a man but a distinct and dynamic personality, opinionated, contemptuous, functioning from within outward—a man who was aware that there could be no honor and yet had honor, who knew the sophistry of courage and yet was brave. a worthy man and his gifted son Anthony drew as much consciousness of social security from being the grandson of Adam J. Patch as he would have had from tracing his line over the sea to the crusaders. This is inevitable; Virginians and Bostonians to the contrary notwithstanding, an aristocracy founded sheerly on money postulates wealth in the particular. Now Adam J. Patch, more familiarly known as “Cross Patch,” left his father’s farm in Tarrytown early in sixty-one to join a New York cavalry regiment. He came home from the war a major, charged into Wall Street, and amid much fuss, fume, applause, and ill will he gathered to himself some seventy-five million dollars. This occupied his energies until he was fifty-seven years old. It was then that he determined, after a severe attack of sclerosis, to consecrate the remainder of his life to the moral regeneration of the world. He became a reformer among reformers. Emulating the magnificent efforts of Anthony Comstock, after whom his grandson was named, he levelled a varied assortment of uppercuts and body-blows at liquor, literature, vice, art, patent medicines, and Sunday theatres. His mind, under the influence of that insidious mildew which eventually forms on all but the few, gave itself up furiously to every indignation of the age. From an armchair in the office of his Tarrytown estate he directed against the en...

Über den Autor / die Autorin

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota, and educated at the Newman School and at Princeton. This Side of Paradise, his first novel, was published in 1920 and transformed him virtually overnight into a spokesman for his generation and a prophet of the Jazz Age. That same year, he married Zelda Sayre, and the two became America’s most celebrated expatriates, dividing their time among New York, Paris, and the Riviera during the Twenties. Fitzgerald’s most famous novel, The Great Gatsby, was published in 1925, and Tender Is the Night in 1934. After Scott and Zelda were forced by money and health problems to return to the States, Fitzgerald became a writer for Hollywood movie studios. He died in 1940 while working on his unfinished novel of Hollywood, The Last Tycoon. His other works include Flappers and Philosophers (1920), The Beautiful and Damned (1922), Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), All the Sad Young Men (1926), and Taps at Reveille (1935).

Ruth Prigozy is Professor of English and Film Studies at Hofstra University. She is Executive Director of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society, which she co-founded in 1990. She has published widely on F. Scott Fitzgerald as well as on Ernest Hemingway, J.D. Salinger, the Hollywood Ten, and film directors Billy Wilder, D.W. Griffith, and Vittorio de Sica. She has edited Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby, and The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald. She is the author of F. Scott Fitzgerald: An Illustrated Life. She has co-edited two volumes on detective fiction and film, one on the short story, and two collections of essays on Fitzgerald.
 

Bericht

Full of precisely observed life. Arthur Mizener

Produktdetails

• Autoren: F. Scott Fitzgerald, F. Scott/ Parini Fitzgerald, Jay Parini, Ruth Prigozy
• Mitarbeit: Jay Parini (Einführung), Ruth Prigozy (Nachwort)
• Verlag: Signet USA
• Sprache: Englisch
• Produktform: Taschenbuch
• Erschienen: 06.02.2007
• EAN: 9780451530431
• ISBN: 978-0-451-53043-1
• Seiten: 400
• Abmessung: 106 mm x 176 mm x 26 mm
• Serien: Signet Classics; Signet Classics
• Themen: Belletristik > Erzählende Literatur; FICTION / Romance / General, FICTION / Literary, FICTION / Classics, Classic fiction (pre c 1945), Classic fiction