The beautiful and damned

The beautiful and Damned is a novel written by F. Scott Fitzgerald and first published in 1922. It is the second novel by the writer.

Adam Patch is an elderly philanthropist, very conservative and wealthy, a follower of traditional morals. This man has a grandson named Anthony Junior, an idler who does nothing in life but wait for the death of his grandfather to inherit his multimillion-dollar fortune.

Anthony meets Gloria, a very beautiful but capricious and selfish young woman, through a writer friend of Gloria's cousin named Dick.

Both get married and begin to squander the money on expenses such as parties, accompanied by aristocratic friends who live on the rents.

However, their luxurious life will be cut short when one day Adam Patch pays them a surprise visit and they are in the middle of a party. Realizing that his grandson was wasting money, he decides not to give them any more money.

This will cause the expenses of the marriage to exceed the income from their bonds, so they have to sell their assets little by little, while they will fight to try to get the inheritance from Anthony's grandfather who has disinherited them...

"In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him. Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a sort of intellectual "There!"—yet at the brink of this story he has as yet gone no further than the conscious stage".