The Beautiful and the Damned

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. As you first see him he wonders frequently whether he is not without honor and slightly mad, a shameful and obscene thinness glistening on the surface of the world like oil on a clean pond, these occasions being varied, of course, with those in which he thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well ad-justed to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows.

Autorentext
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 - December 21, 1940) was an American Jazz Age author of novels and short stories. He is regarded as one of the greatest twentieth century writers. Fitzgerald was of the self-styled "Lost Generation," Americans born in the 1890s who came of age during World War I. He finished four novels, left a fifth unfinished, and wrote dozens of short stories that treat themes of youth, despair, and age.Other Books of Author:The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (1922)The Great Gatsby (1925)Tender is the Night (1933)The Beautiful and the Damned (1922)This Side of Paradise (1920)"I Didn't Get Over" (1936)The Rich Boy (1926)Jacob's Ladder (1927)The Sensible Thing (1924)Bernice Bobs Her Hair (1920)