In letters to John Peale Bishop and his uncle Phil McQuillan, Fitzgerald said that in The Beautiful and the Damned he’d paid much more attention to detail and that, as a result, this book was “much more carefully written than the first one” (the first one being This Side of Paradise). But in a letter to Carl Hovey, the editor of Metropolitan Magazine, where an edited and much cut version of The Beautiful and the Damned was serialized, Fitzgerald worried that it was “a bitter and insolent book that I fear will never be popular and that will undoubtedly offend a lot of people.”

Fitzgerald once described his novels as being “pessimistic,” and The Beautiful and the Damned is certainly that, and then some. However, despite Fitzgerald’s fears, it is a triumph on many levels, particularly in the textures he applies to the characters and their relationships. This is a book which falls squarely under the rubric of “realistic” fiction, for its logic is unerringly simple and is followed without deviation to the bitter (and tragic) end.

No, it’s not The Great Gatsby, but it’s a fine novel in its own right, even though it is “pessimistic”—and profoundly bleak in its outlook on life during the Jazz Age.

[Personal notes recorded in 1999.]