The Beautiful and Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s second novel, published in 1922, two years after his very successful debut with This Side of Paradise, is a great work and necessary development in the writer’s considerable genius, to be fully realized three years later in The Great Gatsby. Where his first novel was a wide eyed, though not entirely innocent look at the means by which a talented, handsome young swell might make his mark in the world, The Beautiful and Damned’s Anthony Patch, the presumptive heir to a tycoon’s fortune, has all but arrived, waiting, as he does, for his considerable inheritance. He courts Gloria, whose sole purpose in life is to be beautiful and to marry well. The book then invites the existential conundrum in the question presented: What does one do when doesn’t have to do anything? The answer is a sad descent into those activities that too often mark and darken America’s uppermost class where food, shelter and clothing are a given forever, where, barring some unusually heinous scandal, society’s acceptance is a given forever, while the characters’ interior lives go begging for something as proletarian as purpose, as banal as meaning. The result for Anthony Patch and his wife, Gloria, is a painful descent down the gradient of glitter to the gray regions of alcoholism, ennui and tragedy.