and Damned had been a maturely written book because it was all true. We ruined ourselves—I have never honestly thought that we ruined each other." Critical analysis Critics have analyzed The Beautiful and Damned as a morality tale, a meditation on love, money and decadence, and a social documentary. Such analyses often focus upon the characters' disproportionate absorption on their past—a fixation which tends to consume them in the present. The theme of absorption in the past also continues through much of Fitzgerald's later works, perhaps best summarized in the final line of his 1925 novel The Great Gatsby: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past", which is inscribed on Fitzgerald's tombstone shared with Zelda in Maryland. According to Fitzgerald scholar James L. W. West III, The Beautiful and Damned is concerned with the question of 'vocation': 'What does one do with oneself when one has nothing to do?' According to West, "Fitzgerald applied the question of vocation largely to his male characters, but he saw that women too needed meaningful roles in life." Fitzgerald presents Gloria as a woman whose vocation is nothing more than to catch a husband. After her marriage to Anthony, Gloria's sole vocation is to slide into indulgence and indolence, while her husband's sole vocation is to wait for his inheritance, during which time he slides into depression and alcoholism. Authorship debate In April 1922, one month after the book's publication, Zelda Fitzgerald was asked by Scott's friend, humorist Burton Rascoe, to review the book for The New-York Tribune as a publicity stunt. Rascoe asked Zelda to pretend to review it and to insert deliberately "a rub here and there" in order to "cause a great deal of comment." Per Rascoe's instructions, Zelda titled her review "Friend Husband's Latest" and wrote "partly [as] a joke" that Fitzgerald had purloined a page of her diary: As a consequence of this statement written in a satirical review by Zelda, various individuals such as Penelope Green have speculated that Zelda was perhaps a co-author of the novel, but most Fitzgerald scholars such as Matthew J. Bruccoli stated there is no evidence whatsoever to support this claim. Bruccoli states: Adaptations A film adaptation in 1922, directed by William A. Seiter, starred Kenneth Harlan as Anthony Patch and Marie Prevost as Gloria. The film did well at the box office, and the critical