The Beautiful and Damned is a 1922 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in New York City, the novel's plot follows a young artist Anthony Comstock Patch and his flapper wife, Gloria Gilbert, who wreck themselves "on the shoals of dissipation" while partying to excess at the dawn of the Jazz Age. As Fitzgerald's sophomore novel, the work focuses on the swinish behavior and glittering excesses of the American idle rich in the mid-1910s heyday of New York's café society.