Background , 1923 Following the meteoric success of his debut novel
This Side of Paradise in March 1920, F. Scott Fitzgerald became a household name. His new fame enabled him to earn much higher rates for his short stories, and his increased financial prospects persuaded his fiancée
Zelda Sayre to marry him as Fitzgerald could now pay for her privileged and affluent lifestyle. At the time, Fitzgerald's feelings for Zelda ebbed to an all-time low, and he told a friend, "I wouldn't care if she died, but I couldn't stand to have anybody else marry her." Despite his reservations, and the early years of their disappointing marriage resembled a friendship. Living in luxury at expensive hotels in New York City, the newlywed couple soon became regarded in the newspapers as the
enfants terribles of the
Jazz Age due to their wild antics. At the
Biltmore Hotel, Scott did handstands in the lobby, while Zelda slid down the hotel banisters. After several weeks, the hotel management evicted them for disturbing other guests. The couple relocated two blocks to the
Commodore Hotel on
42nd Street where Zelda spent half-an-hour spinning in the entrance's revolving door. Fitzgerald likened their juvenile escapades in New York City to two children exploring a great bright barn. Writer
Dorothy Parker first encountered the couple riding on a taxi's roof. "They did both look as though they had just stepped out of the sun", Parker recalled, "their youth was striking. Everyone wanted to meet him." Fitzgerald's ephemeral happiness mirrored the feverish gaiety of the
Jazz Age, a term that he
popularized in his essays and stories. He described the era as racing "along under its own power, served by great filling stations full of money." In Fitzgerald's eyes, the era represented a morally permissive time when Americans became disillusioned with prevailing
social norms and obsessed with self-gratification. During this hedonistic era, drinking
bootleg gin fueled the Fitzgeralds' social life, and they consumed
gin-and-fruit concoctions at every outing. Publicly, their alcohol intake meant little more than napping at parties; privately, it led to bitter quarrels. As their quarrels worsened, the couple accused each other of marital infidelities. They confided to friends that their marriage would not last much longer.
Composition After relocating from New York City to
Westport, Connecticut, in May 1920, Fitzgerald began work on his second novel in August. For inspiration, he turned to the works of
Theodore Dreiser and
Frank Norris, the author of the novels
McTeague and
Vandover and the Brute. The latter 1914 novel,
Vandover and the Brute, concerning the downfall of a gifted Harvard alumnus who becomes a vagrant, particularly influenced Fitzgerald's early conception of the character arc for his protagonist Anthony Patch. His tentative titles for his second novel included
The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy and
The Flight of the Rocket. Mindful of criticisms of
This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald sought to improve on the form and construction of his prose and to venture into the new genre of
literary realism. His work traces the
Hogarthian descent of "lovely young creatures" and "millionaires" into ruin amid the death throes of an old America and the turbulent birth of a new one. In Fitzgerald's view, the "beautiful and damned" of New York's cafe society were as ill-fated as the peasants in
Thomas Hardy's gloomy novels. On August 12, Fitzgerald described the novel's plot to publisher
Charles Scribner II as focusing on the life of an artist who lacks creative inspiration and who, after marrying a beautiful woman, wrecks himself "on the shoals of dissipation". Mirroring the novel's plot, excessive partying interrupted the composition of Fitzgerald's second novel. In one instance, during a wild party at their Westport residence, an unknown guest pulled the fire alarm as a prank. When the firemen arrived and demanded to know the location of the fire, Zelda pointed at her breasts and declared: "Here!" During this same period, Zelda's father, Judge
Anthony D. Sayre, unexpectedly visited Westport. As a
white supremacist and former Southern legislator, Sayre masterminded Alabama's
Jim Crow laws, and his uncle
John T. Morgan previously reigned as the Grand Dragon of Alabama's
Ku Klux Klan. A staunch Prohibitionist, Judge Sayre disapproved of Scott and Zelda's hedonistic lifestyle. His visit may have inspired the scene in which Anthony’s grandfather arrives unexpectedly during a riotous party. Zelda's homesickness for the Jim Crow South next interrupted Fitzgerald's writing. Zelda insisted to her husband that they must return to the South as she wanted peaches and biscuits for breakfast. After an overland excursion by motor car to
Montgomery, Alabama, the couple returned to Westport where Fitzgerald resumed work on his novel. Zelda became pregnant in February 1921. Friction between Zelda and Scott regarding the South resurfaced during Zelda's pregnancy. As a fervent
neo-Confederate, Zelda demanded that the child be born on Southern soil in Jim Crow Alabama, but Fitzgerald refused. Zelda wrote to a friend: "Scott's changed... He used... to say he loved the South, but now he wants to get as far away from it as he can." To Zelda's dismay, her husband insisted on having their baby on northern soil in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Revisions . Throughout the winter and spring of 1921–22, Fitzgerald rewrote various drafts of
The Beautiful and Damned. He modeled the spoiled characters of Anthony Patch on himself and Gloria Patch on—in his words—the chill-minded selfishness of his helplessly privileged Southern wife. During her idle youth, Zelda's wealthy Southern family employed domestic servants, predominantly African-American. Accustomed to these black servants catering to and fulfilling her every need, Zelda showed little competence in managing ordinary responsibilities, from money matters to daily tasks. Fitzgerald drew on the early years of his disappointing marriage after the meteoric success of the author's first novel
This Side of Paradise. He divided the manuscript into three major parts: "The Pleasant Absurdity of Things", "The Romantic Bitterness of Things", and "The Ironic Tragedy of Things". In final form, the novel consists of untitled "books" of three chapters each. Fitzgerald revised
The Beautiful and Damned based on suggestions from his friend
Edmund Wilson and his editor
Max Perkins. While reviewing the manuscript, Perkins praised the development of Fitzgerald's literary skill. Fitzgerald dedicated the novel to the Anglo-Irish writer
Shane Leslie, drama critic
George Jean Nathan, and his editor Max Perkins in appreciation of their guidance and encouragement. While finalizing the novel, Fitzgerald traveled to Europe with his wife, and his agent
Harold Ober sold the novel's serialization rights to
Metropolitan magazine for $7,000.
Metropolitan serialized the chapters from September 1921 to March 1922. Shortly before the novel's publication in book form by
Charles Scribner's Sons, Zelda Fitzgerald made a sketch for the dust jacket of her husband's novel depicting a naked flapper sitting in a
cocktail glass, but the publisher instead used an illustration by
W. E. Hill. On March 4, 1922, Scribner's published the book with an initial print run of approximately 20,000 copies, and
The Beautiful and Damned sold well enough to warrant additional print runs reaching 50,000 copies. == Critical reception ==