The Beautiful and Damned is a 1922 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, his second, that portrays New York café society and the American Eastern elite during the Jazz Age. As in his other novels, Fitzgerald's characters in this novel are complex, materialistic and experience significant disruptions in respect to classism, marriage, and intimacy. The novel purportedly was based on the early years of Fitzgerald's marriage to his wife Zelda Fitzgerald, and many critics typically consider the work to be among Fitzgerald's weaker novels. During the final decade of his life, Fitzgerald remarked upon the novel's lack of quality in a letter to his wife: "I wish the Beautiful and Damned had been a maturely written book because it was all true. We ruined ourselves—I have never honestly thought that we ruined each other."