F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned (1922) is frequently read as a novel of Jazz Age decadence, privileged youth, alcoholism, romantic disillusionment, and the moral exhaustion of the American leisure class. Such a reading, however, risks reducing the novel to a period piece. A closer interpretation reveals a much more durable social anatomy: Fitzgerald examines what happens when inherited wealth substitutes for vocation, when beauty becomes a form of social capital, when marriage becomes entangled with property, and when the desire for pleasure gradually consumes the capacity for meaningful action. This review reads the novel through literary, sociological, anthropological, and philosophical frameworks. Thorstein Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption, Georg Simmel’s analysis of metropolitan modernity, Émile Durkheim’s concept of anomie, Max Weber’s account of status and rationalization, Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of distinction and cultural capital, Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical sociology, Mary Douglas’s anthropology of classification, and Marcel Mauss’s theory of exchange illuminate different dimensions of Fitzgerald’s world. The review also places the novel beside contemporary cultures of consumption, celebrity, curated identity, inherited privilege, and digital self-display. Rather than treating Anthony Patch and Gloria Gilbert simply as morally defective individuals, the review argues that they are products and performers of a social system in which desire has become detached from purpose. The novel’s enduring importance lies precisely here: its “beautiful” surfaces conceal a structure of social, psychological, economic, and cultural baggage that modern societies have not entirely discarded.