This Side of Paradise
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Published in 1920, This Side of Paradise announced F. Scott Fitzgerald as the chronicler of a restless new American generation. Its protagonist, Amory Blaine, moves from the privileged world of elite schools and Princeton University into the uncertain freedoms of adulthood, pursuing romance, intellectual distinction and a convincing sense of self. His encounters with women, writers and fellow students form a portrait of youth caught between inherited conventions and modern ambitions.
Partly autobiographical and alive with youthful experimentation, the novel combines narrative, dialogue, verse and social observation in a form as unsettled as its hero. Fitzgerald examines class, education, vanity, love and the seductive promise of reinvention in post-war America. Its commercial success helped establish the author’s early reputation and captured the mood of the Jazz Age before the decade had fully begun. Though less controlled than his later fiction, it offers an illuminating starting point for understanding the ambitions and disillusions that would shape his literary world.
From the book
“I know myself, but that is all.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
On This Side of Paradise
“His first novel … was a tremendous critical and commercial success.”
— Penguin Books