Recommendations
Books Like The Beautiful and Damned
Best books to read after The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Beautiful and Damned is the Fitzgerald novel that most directly captures the Jazz Age as it was actually felt — the gradual dissolution of beauty and talent in a world organized around wealth and social performance. If the novel's portrait of Anthony and Gloria's deterioration moved you, these books share its concern with how privilege and affluence can be as destructive as poverty, and how the pursuit of pleasure gradually empties the people who pursue it.
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The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The transformation of The Beautiful and Damned's material into perfect form — the same themes of wealth, illusion, and the corruption of American aspiration, but organized around the mythic figure of Gatsby rather than the realistic deterioration of Anthony and Gloria; Gatsby shows what Fitzgerald could do when he stopped being directly autobiographical
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Tender Is the Night
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The psychological deepening of everything The Beautiful and Damned attempts — Dick Diver's disintegration presented with the formal sophistication and psychological complexity that Fitzgerald had developed over the intervening decade; the companion piece to The Beautiful and Damned for readers who want to follow Fitzgerald's development
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Brideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh
Waugh's elegy for a world of beauty and privilege that cannot sustain itself is the British parallel to The Beautiful and Damned — both are novels that are in love with the world they portray while simultaneously demonstrating its moral emptiness; both combine acute social satire with genuine emotional attachment to the doomed beautiful world they describe
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Vanity Fair
by William Makepeace Thackeray
Thackeray's satirical panorama of English society organized around the social climbing of Becky Sharp and the sentimental passivity of Amelia Sedley — the 19th-century model for the satirical portrait of a social world organized around status and money that The Beautiful and Damned adapts for Jazz Age New York
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The Bonfire of the Vanities
by Tom Wolfe
Tom Wolfe's satirical portrait of 1980s New York — a bond trader's catastrophic decline through the legal and social system — is the most contemporary parallel to The Beautiful and Damned in its portrait of a man who builds his identity around wealth and social standing and discovers, through their loss, that they were the only things sustaining him
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Bright Lights, Big City
by Jay McInerney
McInerney's 1984 novel — written in the second person, about a fact-checker at a New Yorker-style magazine who is destroying himself with cocaine and grief after his wife leaves — is the most direct 1980s heir to The Beautiful and Damned's portrait of a talented young man's dissolution in the social world of the American city; dedicated to Fitzgerald
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Less Than Zero
by Bret Easton Ellis
Ellis's debut novel about wealthy Los Angeles teenagers drifting through a world of parties, drugs, and casual moral emptiness — the most radical contemporary extension of The Beautiful and Damned's portrait of what happens when a social class has money and beauty but no purpose or values
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The Age of Innocence
by Edith Wharton
Wharton's portrait of Old New York society — a world of rigid conventions that prevents its members from acting on their desires — is the most psychologically precise predecessor to The Beautiful and Damned in its portrait of a social world that enforces conformity at the expense of individual vitality; both novels are about people destroyed by the social world they inhabit
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