Macmillan Collector’s Library: The Beautiful and Damned

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was born into a well-to-do Catholic family living in St Paul, Minnesota. At Princeton University he decided to become a writer, leaving without graduating in 1917 to join the army when America entered the First World War. Believing he would be killed at the front, he hurriedly wrote his first novel, but was not sent to Europe.

His first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920) was published to great critical acclaim. He married Zelda Sayle a week after the publication and they embarked on an extravagant lifestyle in New York, which provided much material for The Beautiful and Damned (1922). By this time their daughter, Scottie, had been born, Scott and Zelda had moved to Long Island, which was to be the setting of Fitzgerald’s next novel, The Great Gatsby (1925). His fourth novel Tender is the Night, was published in 1934.