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| | Beautiful but damned | By genre | Guardian Unlimited Books |
 | | Within five years came the slight The Beautiful and the Damned, about the excesses of the idle rich he'd met there; and then, improbably, in 1925, The Great Gatsby, perhaps the most perfect short novel in the English language. |
 | | His father was a failed businessman from Maryland, and as a child Scott was encouraged to nurture a wistful romanticism about the American South, with its faded elegance, genteel old families and confederate honour. |
 | | He nurtured, too, a cult of doomed youth, whereby to be young and beautiful (and certainly rich) was to be most fully alive, and to be old was nothing. |
| books.guardian.co.uk /reviews/classics/0,,156938,00.html (1239 words) |
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