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F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
The Beautiful and Damned.
New York: Scribners, 1922.
The victor belongs to the spoils.
—Anthony Patch
THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED
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Chapter I. Anthony Patch
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Chapter I. The Radiant Hour
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Chapter I. A Matter of Civilization
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To Shane Leslie, George Jean Nathan and Maxwell Perkins
in appreciation of much literary help and encouragement
Book One.
Chapter I.
Anthony Patch
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 adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows.