Customer Reviews:
An excellent study of the flaming youth.......2004-11-12
This well researched and well written study of young people in the 1920's is indespensable to anyone who is interested in the social history of the period. It examines all facets of the "flaming youth" of the period, and offers careful analysis of the people and period. Ms. Fass uses a broad range of original sources to construct her detailed work. Despite it's breadth and depth, it is also easy and fun enough for anyone to read.
This book is absolutely indespensable to anyone who enjoys Fitzgerald, the history of young people, 20th century social history, or the 1920's.
THE ABSOLUTE BEST STUDY OF ITS KIND.......2001-02-12
When I was writing my book COMPLICATED WOMEN, I started looking for books that talked about what was happening with youth in the early part of the 20th century. THE DAMNED AND THE BEAUTY had everything I needed to know. Fass's research is thorough and impeccable, and she's a fine writer. I leaned heavily on this book and on Fass's research. I read other books, plenty of them, but kept coming back to this one. Anyone interested in the 1920s should read this. No scholar who writes about the 20s should dare pass this up.
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- Beautifully Written about Depressing Story of the B & D'd [96]
- Silent Screams of Change
- "They were in love with the generalities."
- Just short of greatness
- Fitzgerald and I know some of the same people.
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The Beautiful and Damned
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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This Side of Paradise
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Tender Is the Night
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The Love of the Last Tycoon
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The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A New Collection
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The Crack-Up
ASIN: 0743451503 |
Book Description
First published in 1922, The Beautiful and the Damned followed Fitzgerald's impeccable debut, This Side of Paradise, thus securing his place in the tradition of great American novelists. Embellished with the author's lyrical prose, here is the story of Harvard-educated, aspiring aeshete Anthony Patch and his beautiful wife, Gloria. As they await the inheritance of his grandfather's fortune, their reckless marriage sways under the influence of alcohol and avarice. A devastating look at the nouveaux riches and New York nightlife, as well as the ruinous effects wild ambiion, The Beautiful and the Damned achieved stature as one of Fitzgerzld's most accomplished novels. Its distinction as a classic endures to this day.
Pocket Book's Enriched Classics present the great works of world literature enhaced for the contemporary reader. Special features include critical perspectives, suggestions for further read, and a unique visual essay composed of period photographs that help bring every word to life.
Customer Reviews:
Beautifully Written about Depressing Story of the B & D'd [96].......2007-10-07
Fitzgerald's farce or satire on upper crust New Yorkers can only be described as being realty becoming greater than fiction. Proclaiming the story "was all true", Fitzgerald intimated that this book was something akin to a kiss-and-tell novel about what had happened within America's richest crowd during the time of World War I.
"Anthony, Maury, and Dick sent in their applications for officers' training-camps and the two latter went about feeling strangely exalted and reproachless; they chattered to each other, like college boys, of war's being the one excuse for, and justification of, the aristocrat, and conjured up an impossible caste of officers, to be composed, it appeared, chiefly of the more attractive alumni of three or four eastern colleges."
Princetonian Fitzgerald created a Harvard protagonist Anthony Patch whose birth right is basically his only strong characteristic - at least so at the end of the novel. During his venerable youth, he locks eyes onto friend Rick's cousin, beautiful Gloria, whose unique spirit and vivaciousness make the self-described bachelor become betrothed.
The book follows the couple for a period of just less than a decade, during which time they fall into numerous elations, and depressions. This see-saw bipolar personality/lifestyle depiction is all-too-common in Fitzgerald's novels. Such was well accentuated in Fitzgerald's doctor and patient relationship in "Tender is the Night" as the patient is ultimately cured and the doctor falls into a deep feeling of desultory depression -- dipsomania. Another of Fitzgerald's common themes is of men chasing after beautiful women who make the boys feel blushing discomfiture. Well depicted here with Gloria as well as in "This Side of Paradise" and its Amory Blaine who constantly trips in his whirlwind attempts to conquer beautiful Rosalind (whose personality and looks mirror those of Gloria).
As the book progresses, you see the self esteem of Anthony deflate, while his wife amazingly awaits him to recover, by miracle or otherwise, and be the man she grew to love at the tender age of 22. Like "Tender is the Night", alcohol interferes with the person and with his relationships -- Anthony becomes a drunken "bore."
There are points of this book you have to think - is this a hypothetical autobiography. Had "Tender is the Night" bombed instead of won critical acclaim, would not Fitzgerald have fallen into the liquor bottle like Anthony? I am sure he wondered as such.
But, as sad as the book can be, Fitzgerald had times of folly and humor. Even a self-deprecating humor. He writes, in one discourse where the people talk disapprovingly about the new novels: "You know these new novels make me tired. My God! Everywhere I go some silly girl asks me if I've read `This Side of Paradise.' Are our girls really like that?"
Amazingly well written, and even more astonishing in that Fitzgerald was 25 years old when he wrote this novel, this book deserves its acclaim and infamy.
Silent Screams of Change.......2006-11-15
"It is the manner of life seldom to strike but always to wear away." In The Beautiful and Damned, the author, F. Scott Fitzgerald creates a compelling struggle between life and his two dynamic characters Anthony and Gloria. Fitzgerald inserts his own questions of life and relationships in the offhand statements of his characters, usually too well placed to even be noticed by the reader. And such is the manner of The Beautiful and Damned, to strike at the soul and mind and to wear away our own definitions and conceptions through silent screams of indecision, fear and regret.
Fitzgerald uses his understanding of literature and the power of words to convey two stories: one on the surface, and one, hidden below all plot lines, running deep within each character and within all people who have ever dared to live. He uses color and imagery to clue his readers to this underlying message. Also, Fitzgerald writes in a "play-like" manner, with certain character dialogues, a sense of staging, narration and even in some parts of the book even special "play-like" formatting. This method creates an image of the surface plot, the plot the reader can tangibly grasp: the raised print on the page, the crisp sheets, the grammar and the structure of the story. These elements leave behind all that the reader feels and understands on a deeper level inside the mind, making each reader digest all this information alone, because it is not just bluntly stated by Fitzgerald on paper. This story allows the reader to just read a story, or to jump into the structure of the mind and soul, freeing locked feelings and questions. Fitzgerald's power is to massage his words giving each phrase the power to strike the reader and let them see themselves for the first time.
"They were in love with the generalities.".......2006-09-22
I recently went to see Gatz, the wonderful adaptation of Gatsby by the Elevator Repair Service, and it inspired me to go back to Fitzgerald's body of work. I had read all the major the major works except for The Beautiful and Damned, and I decided to remedy that gap.
The Beautiful and Damned is an interesting book-- I probably liked it the least of all the Fitzgerald works, but I like his work enough that this is far from a bad thing. I could have lived without the overly obvious moralizing genaralities, but Fitzgerald himself recognized that this book had been written in too much of a hurry.
The major strength of the novel is, of course, the characters. We have all known versions of Gloria and Anthony Patch. We went to college with them. They were the social butterflies who seemed to have no worries, no weaknesses, and no real cares. We all assume that somewhere along the way they had to have stopped partying and found something to do-- you cannot imagine these people at 30. The Beautiful and Damned is something about what happens when the butterflies of the world keep going well past the point of excusable youthful mistakes.
People who already enjoy Fitzgerald should give The Beautiful and the Damned a read. It is certainly no Great Gatsby, but still contains much of the style and talent that made Fitzgerald so justly famous. Pay particular attention to the language and the turn of the phrase-- even in his lesser works, Fitzgerald is unparalleled at his particular kind of style.
Just short of greatness .......2006-06-29
Fitzgerald is at his best in his brilliant and subtle characterizations in this book. He has a terrific grasp of his characters and finds ways to make them realistic. The problem with his characters is that none of them are really likable. I am sure not even Fitzgerald himself thought the characters to be particularly sympathetic. Maybe this was his aim, but it prevents the reader from getting overly involved in the work. I found myself rooting against the main characters, and really all the characters, because they were so egocentric and pompous. It is brillaint writing, no doubt about that, but it is hard to really love a book when the characters are ALL so hatable.
It is also a rather depressing and bleak look at society. So too is the Great Gatsby, but this one does not seem to have that certain charm that makes you love it. Despite Gatsby's and Nick's flaws they were mostly sympathetic characters.
Don't get me wrong, this was a really enjoyable and interesting book, but just could not quite grasp its own epic aims.
Fitzgerald and I know some of the same people........2006-06-19
This story follows the lives of two good-looking, hip, and sufficiently wealthy people. They do not need to work, and in a sense don't know how, and this, among other privileges, eventually leads to their undoing. Their leisure condemns them. I read this book while I was going through a season of envying the people in my life who are independently wealthy, and don't have to punch an alarm clock each morning to "join the fray." They seem oblivious to the frustrations I encounter working two jobs, watching my budget, buying sensibly. This story served as a reminder that, while challenging, my lifestyle of "earning my living" provides a healthy groundedness and sensibility that I may not get any other way.
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Beautiful and the Damned: The Creation of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Photography
Roger Hargreaves ,
Peter Hamilton , and
National Portrait Gallery (Great Britain)
Manufacturer: Lund Humphries Publishers
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ASIN: 0853318212 |
Customer Reviews:
The Polly Parker Stories.......2005-12-27
I am really shocked that this first rate Fitzgerald collection does not have the "Polly Parker" stories that originally were printed serially in THE SATURDAY EVENING POST in 1922. Apparently these uncollected stories remain unavailable anywhere in book form.
Polly Parker was a typical Fitzgerald heroine -- a blue-eyed flapper with a pert nose and golden hair bobbed very short. The reason her stories are omitted, I gather, is that they were slightly more sexual in tone and also addressed taboo subjects such as alcoholism, racial violence, incest, and insanity.
"GRANDPA'S GOLD" the first Polly story, deals with lasting echoes of the Civil War. Spoiled Polly goes to Vermont for the summer to stay with her aging grandfather -- the last remaining Union army veteran in Vermont. Ultimately she robs him of a small fortune in gold coins which he had originally intended to donate to a Negro orphanage. This story highlights Fitzgerald's ambivalence towards the young women of the day -- Polly is cruel and selfish, but also winningly spontaneous, free and independent. Fitzgerald's racism is in full flower here as well. The fact that she is "only" robbing colored people seems to make her crime an amusing prank rather than a vicious crime.
"ALLIGATOR QUEEN" is both darker and more sophisticated. Polly is a houseguest in Georgia, where she meets Eleanor Hiss, a jazz age siren who may or may not have negro blood. The two girls deliberately lead a young Harvard man out into quicksand, then go joy riding in his car while he slowly drowns. Fitzgerald later wrote that Eleanor seduced Polly in an early draft -- but in 1922 the SATURDAY EVENING POST would never have carried a story with an explicit lesbian seduction.
"HOLY MATRIMONY" is the ironic finale to the Polly Parker stories. Invited on a weekend yachting party, Polly is compromised by an Eastern Prince and forced to marry silent movie star Reginald Dashwood. Dashwood is a homosexual who needs "discreet companionship." Polly marries him, assuming he is a pushover, but instead he is cruel, domineering and controlling -- and aided by an iron-willed mother who treats Polly like a servant. Polly's "punishment" is ironic, since she now has unlimited wealth and a dazzling husband -- but no freedom and no hope of either sexual or spiritual release.
Taken together, these three stories represent Fitzgerald's darkest early work -- and they should be included in any "definitive" collection.
Short Stories.......2002-09-12
I bought this book for the short stories. They are like small diamonds on a necklace, sparkling in a row, each one a wonder. Fitzgerald's short stories are like that.
"The Off Shore Pirate" is hilarious. The "Ice Palace" is strange and beautiful. "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" is about a baby born very old who gets younger every year.
"The Diamond As Big As The Ritz" is classic Fitzgerald, about the rich.
The story that is missing is "The Rich Boy." This is the story that started the famous spat between Hemingway and Fitzgerald.
In this short story, Fitzgerald writes: "The rich are very different from you and me." Hemingway responds in his short story, "The Snows Of Kilimanjaro:" "Yes, they have more money."
But you will not find "The Rich Boy" in this book. Too bad.
Included with the short stories are two novels:: This Side Of Paradise and The Beautiful And Damned. They are very adolescent novels. High school students might enjoy them.
Maybe not.
The short stories do more to describe the Jazz Age than his novels.
If you are serious about this author, his greatest novel is The Great Gatsby. His next best novel is Tender Is The Night. "The Rich Boy" is his best short story.
Good Collection of Pre-Gatsby Work.......2000-11-13
This is a very attractive packaged, comprehensive collection of Fitzgerald's early work, containing his first two novels (This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful & Damned) and his first two short story collections. Included are some classic short stories such as May Day and The Diamond As Big As The Ritz. Some of the other stories are less than classic, but all are enjoyable. As is the case with all Library of America volumes, the book is very easy to handle and read. There is a useful set of notes and chronology of Fitzergald's life in the back. All in all, this is well worth the price.
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The Beautiful and Damned (Signet Classics)
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Manufacturer: Signet Classics
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This Side of Paradise
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ASIN: 0451530438 |
Book Description
Here is a portrait of greed, ambition, and squandered talent, as depicted in the lives of the very wealthy Anthony Patch and his willful wife Gloria.
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The Ivan Moffat File: Life Among the Beautiful and Damned in London, Paris, New York,and Hollywood
Gavin Lambert
Manufacturer: Pantheon
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0375422471
Release Date: 2004-10-12 |
Book Description
Here is a fascinating portrait of Hollywood screenwriter Ivan Moffat, whose lonely, aristocratic childhood led to a precociously fashionable and sensual life in London’s High Bohemia in the late 1930s, service in director George Stevens’s World War II film documentary unit, and membership in Hollywood’s dazzling postwar expatriate community.
Moffat’s grandfather, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, was one of the most celebrated actors of his day, producing and starring in everything from Richard II to Pygmalion on the London stage and founding the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. His mother, Iris Tree, was a well-known poet-actress-adventuress whose circle included British bluebloods Nancy Cunard and Diana Cooper, and Bloomsburyites Carrington, Lytton Strachey, and Augustus John. Ivan’s photographer father, Curtis Moffat, came from a well-connected New York family, studied with Man Ray, and had an audacious showroom that focused on Moderne furniture and lighting, some of which he designed himself. But Ivan Moffat’s extraordinary pedigree was only the foundation upon which he built his own equally extraordinary and surprisingly active personal life, populated by the leading artists and personalities of his day—from Aldous Huxley and Dylan Thomas to Preston Sturges, Charlie Chaplin, Billy Wilder, and David Selznick.
In 1943 Moffat enlisted in the army and was assigned to Stevens’s unit, started by Eisenhower, which covered the last stage of World War II, from D-day to the fall of Berlin and the liberation of the concentration camps. After the war, Stevens invited Moffat to become an associate producer for his new Hollywood company. Moffat’s unofficial credits on the screenplays for A Place in the Sun and Shane and his co-writing credit on Giant led to a successful screenwriting career, and at the same time he became a leading social figure in Hollywood. Moffat had affairs with many women—from a waitress to a duchess, from a stripper to a movie star. The most serious affair of his life was probably with the
novelist Caroline Blackwood.
At the center of The Ivan Moffat File is the elegantly written autobiography that Moffat was working on at the time of his death in 2002, to which Gavin Lambert adds never-before-seen letters, interviews, and screenplays, as well as many anecdotes and his own memories of Moffat. The result is a re-creation of the life of this unique figure, flamboyant and mysterious.
Customer Reviews:
Admiration and Mystery.......2005-06-21
Moffat called his autobiography ABSOLUTE HEAVEN, from a phrase his parents often used when he, as a child, asked them what they had done the night before, in the glittering London social scene they inhabited. "Went to a party, darling. It was absolute heaven." Moffat wrote his memoirs out by hand in a series of notebooks, and one of them has disappeared, so the book takes an awfully big jump right at an exciting part, and we land down again ten years later. Gavin Lambert, the novelist and biographer, fills in the gaps in his own way. Lambert knew Moffat himself, and also interviewed many of the survivors: people who had known him from all walks of life.
If you have recently read THE OTHER CHEKHOV, the biography of acting coach Michael Chekhov, and you've been curious about Darlington Hall, the experimental British art and drama school at which Chekhov worked, you will find a lot more of it in ABSOLUTE HEAVEN, for Ivan Moffat was a student there, and very close to Beatrice Straight and her family (the patrons of the hall). I found Moffat's late in life passion for Caroline Blackwood very touching, and the realization at the end of his life that he was actually the father of Caroline's daughter Ivana is wonderfully told and imagined. Another fine section details his work with the Hollywood director George Stevens on the US Army filmmaking unit that travelled and filmed everything they could from D-Day to Auschwitz to Stalingrad. Talk about high adventure!
The mystery that remains is the unevenness of Moffat's artistic production. After the war, his work with Stevens on the scripts of GIANT, SHANE, and A PLACE IN THE SUN is exemplary, and Lambert mounts a welcome defense of THEY CAME TO CORDURA and the ill-fated BHOWANI JUNCTION that makes you want to see these pictures once again. And yet, at the end of the day, Moffat remains fairly opaque, as though his life had been led at such a clip there was no time for him really to make any sense out of it, especially in the painted bungalows of Hollywood and the traffic lights of the Sunset Strip. This isn't Gavin Lambert's masterpiece (that would probably be THE GOODBY PEOPLE) but in some ways it feels closer to autobiography than Lambert's own memoir pieces do. He is always a writer worth reading and one of the only living writers whose hand I would like to shake.
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The Bodley Head F. Scott Fitzgerald: Vol.4: The Beautiful and Damned
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Manufacturer: Vintage/Ebury (A Division of Random House Group)
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ASIN: 0370005481 |
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The Beautiful and Damned (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Manufacturer: Penguin Books
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Customer Reviews:
Rollicking Good Realism........2004-12-23
``The Beautiful and Damned,'' F. Scott Fitzgerald's second published novel, is a penetrating portrait of the idle rich. It is vital social commentary that previews themes the author would deal with in his next and best book, ``The Great Gatsby.''
The greatest strength and greatest weakness of ``The Beautiful and Damned'' is that it doesn't have even one likable character. The closest we come is Muriel Kane, the friend of Gloria who volunteers for World War I nurse duty, and Joseph Bloeckman, the producer who tries to get Gloria into the movies. Bloeckman's line of work leads one to think his friendship is illusory like a movie.
The story revolves around Anthony Patch, grandson of multimillionaire Adam Patch, and Gloria Gilbert, Anthony's wife. The family name is a clue that something is being masked the way a patch covers a hole. This turns out to be grandpa Patch's sleazy life as a Wall Street operator. His fortune secured, Adam Patch attempts repentance by becoming a social reformer and prohibitionist. If alive today, the senior Patch would no doubt have a talk show on right-wing radio.
Anthony, an only child and layabout Harvard grad, is waiting for his grandfather to die so his life can begin in earnest. Gloria is equally aimless (who says alike repel?). Gloria, also an only child from parents living above their means, complains regularly about odors and people's cleanliness. Gloria doesn't complain about the cleanliness of boozer and smoker Anthony because he comes with the most pleasant smell of all -- the sweet savor of money.
Grandfather Patch proves rather durable and this causes the marriage of Anthony and Gloria to become nearly unendurable. Money gets tight and the couple ventures out into employment with humorous and sad results -- Anthony as a stock salesman and Gloria as an actress.
Fitzgerald's legendary wit is fully on display throughout. He roasts situations and institutions as well as his characters --
On war (p. 249 of the Penguin paperback edition): ``Wilson and his cabinet -- a cabinet that in its lack of distinction was strangely reminiscent of the twelve apostles -- let loose the carefully starved dogs of war, and the press began to whoop hysterically against sinister morals, sinister philosophy and sinister music produced by the Teutonic temperament. Those who fancied themselves particularly broad-minded made the exquisite distinction that it was only the German Government which aroused them to hysteria; the rest were worked up to a condition of retching indecency.''
On peace (p. 319): ``Over in Europe the usual number of children had swollen stomachs from starvation, and the diplomats were at their customary business of making the world safe for new wars...Peace had come down in earnest, the beginning of new days.''
Anthony, survivor of a Job-like experience, finally gets what he thought he wanted. Gloria is back to her essential self. A happy ending? Not exactly. Purposelessness has taken its toll.
There is much biography weaved into ``The Beautiful and Damned'' and that adds poignancy. The lives of Fitzgerald and wife Zelda greatly mirror Anthony and Gloria. It is amazing how a man can embrace a lifestyle yet mercilessly criticize it. This is testimony to Fitzgerald's uniqueness and power. Less honest and less talented people could not produce such work.
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The Beautiful and the Damned Volume 1 [EasyRead Comfort Edition]
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Manufacturer: ReadHowYouWant.com
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 1425059317
Release Date: 2007-01-01 |
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An adroit piece of fiction based on reality. It satirizes the ostentatious upper-crust society and their shallowness. It is especially noteworthy for its simple, meaningful language and true-to-life characterization. Compelling!
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The Beautiful and Damned: Library Edition
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Manufacturer: Blackstone Audiobooks
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ASIN: 0786194146 |
Books:
- The Decameron (Signet Classics)
- The Great Gatsby
- The Illustrated History of Magic
- The Immoralist (Penguin Classics)
- The Letters of Abelard and Heloise (Penguin Classics)
- The Lord of the Rings
- The Lords and the New Creatures
- The Merck Manual 18th Edition
- The Mill on the Floss (Penguin Classics)
- The Mysterious Island (Modern Library Classics)
Books Index
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