In celebration of The Great Gatsby finally entering the public domain we’ll be looking at one of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s earlier and lesser known books: The Beautiful and Damned.
It tells the story of a young man and woman who both entered their adult lives with just about everything a 1920 socialite could dream of: education, beauty, status and inherited wealth. And yet despite these tremendous advantages their lives seem devoid of meaning and eventually devolve into endless cycles of self sabotage and regret. It’s a glorious train wreck of a tale full of cynical philosophy and all too real drama and depression.
Word Count: 128305 words
Average Word Size: 4.4 letters
Median Word Size: 4 letters
Longest Word: hypersensitiveness (18 letters)
Sentence Count: 8211 sentences
Average Sentence Length: 15.6 words
Median Sentence Length: 11.0 words
Longest Sentence: 110 words long
Her bedroom, which had seemed so pink and young and delicate, appropriate to her pastel-shaded lingerie tossed here and there on chair and bed, seemed now to whisper with its rustling curtains: “Ah, my beautiful young lady, yours is not the first daintiness and delicacy that has faded here under the summer suns … generations of unloved women have adorned themselves by that glass for rustic lovers who paid no heed…. Youth has come into this room in palest blue and left it in the gray cerements of despair, and through long nights many girls have lain awake where that bed stands pouring out waves of misery into the darkness.”
