The Beautiful and Damned - Introduction by Geoff Dyer

Francis Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age - a term he popularized in his short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age. His first novel, This Side of Paradise, was published in 1920 and was a tremendous critical and commercial success. Fitzgerald followed with The Beautiful and the Damned, The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night . He was working on The Last Tycoon when he died, in Hollywood, in 1940.
Geoff Dyer is the author of four novels and numerous non-fiction books, including But Beautiful, which was awarded the Somerset Maugham Prize, and Out of Sheer Rage, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. The winner of a Lannan Literary Award, the International Centre of Photography's 2006 Infinity Award for writing on photography, the American Academy of Arts and Letters' E. M. Forster Award, a National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and a Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction, Dyer is a regular contributor to many publications in the UK and the US. He lives in California.