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This Side of Paradise

f. scott fitzgerald

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There was, also, a curious strain of weakness running crosswise through his make-up ... a harsh phrase from the lips of an older boy (older boys usually detested him) was liable to sweep him off his poise into surly sensitiveness, or timid stupidity ... he was a slave to his own moods and he felt that though he was capable of recklessness and audacity, he possessed neither courage, perseverance, nor self-respect.

0 pages, Hardcover

First published March 26,1920
Places
princeton new jersey, princeton university new jersey, new jersey, minneapolis minnesota, lake geneva wisconsin, new york city new york, maryland, 

This edition

Format
0 pages, Hardcover
Published
January 1, 2004 by Borders Classics
ISBN
9781419289644
ASIN
1419289640
Language
English
Characters More characters

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About the author

Profile Image for f. scott fitzgerald

f. scott fitzgerald

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Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, widely known simply as Scott Fitzgerald, was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age, a term he popularized in his short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age. During his lifetime, he published four novels, four story collections, and 164 short stories. Although he achieved temporary popular success and fortune in the 1920s, Fitzgerald received critical acclaim only after his death and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.
Born into a middle-class family in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald was raised primarily in New York state. He attended Princeton University where he befriended future literary critic Edmund Wilson. Owing to a failed romantic relationship with Chicago socialite Ginevra King, he dropped out in 1917 to join the United States Army during World War I. While stationed in Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre, a Southern debutante who belonged to Montgomery's exclusive country-club set. Although she initially rejected Fitzgerald's marriage proposal due to his lack of financial prospects, Zelda agreed to marry him after he published the commercially successful This Side of Paradise (1920). The novel became a cultural sensation and cemented his reputation as one of the eminent writers of the decade.
His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), propelled him further into the cultural elite. To maintain his affluent lifestyle, he wrote numerous stories for popular magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's Weekly, and Esquire. During this period, Fitzgerald frequented Europe, where he befriended modernist writers and artists of the "Lost Generation" expatriate community, including Ernest Hemingway. His third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), received generally favorable reviews but was a commercial failure, selling fewer than 23,000 copies in its first year. Despite its lackluster debut, The Great Gatsby is now hailed by some literary critics as the "Great American Novel". Following the deterioration of his wife's mental health and her placement in a mental institute for schizophrenia, Fitzgerald completed his final novel, Tender Is the Night (1934).
Struggling financially because of the declining popularity of his works during the Great Depression, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood, where he embarked upon an unsuccessful career as a screenwriter. While living in Hollywood, he cohabited with columnist Sheilah Graham, his final companion before his death. After a long struggle with alcoholism, he attained sobriety only to die of a heart attack in 1940, at 44. His friend Edmund Wilson edited and published an unfinished fifth novel, The Last Tycoon (1941), after Fitzgerald's death. In 1993, a new edition was published as The Love of the Last Tycoon, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli.

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Community Reviews

Rating(3.8 / 5.0, 98 votes)
5 stars
24(24%)
4 stars
33(34%)
3 stars
41(42%)
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98 reviews All reviews
Profile Image for Kimberly .
Yaboku
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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It's true what they say: the first novel always ends up being partly autobiographical, whether intentionally or not. This Side of Paradise is quintessential Fitzgerald, plain and simple. The novel oozes with easily recognizable youthful charm, rich poetic style, and warm nostalgic spirit - all in all, an absolute pleasure to read, which did put a big smile on my face more than once. Highly recommended.

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“Beauty and love pass, I know… Oh, there’s sadness, too. I suppose all great happiness is a little sad. Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses.”
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bam541
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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Clearly an early work (1920), with many imperfections, but still, it captivates. The composition is a bit messy, pluriform, so not everything is equally good. The central themes are that of the Fallen Angel and of punctured certainties. Perhaps this could qualify more as a Quest than as a 'Bildungsroman' or a 'coming-of-age'. Reading this, it felt a bit like Oscar Wilde, with an intrusive accumulation of quotes. (2.5 stars)
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xCuteee
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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the kind of book that you can steal personality from but mine is already suspiciously close
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polandspringz
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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I wanted to like this book because it has all the trappings of books I tend to enjoy, including gradual disillusionment with life and a character who I relate to, i.e. bad work ethic and excessive emotional reactions. I think the issue is I can't stand when people are condescending or care about status and so it made it hard for me to like the character. On top of that I wasn't quite sure what the plot or purpose of the book was. There was a lot of random poetry included in between the prose and I didn't think the poetry was good to be quite honest. The book just felt meandering, the main character was unlikeable, none of the other characters were developed in any meaningful way and so I didn't really like this one. I liked this even less than The Great Gatsby. Mostly I just felt bored.
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Darryldarryl127
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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I love that Fitzgerald started this novel when he was twenty-one years old and a Princeton dropout, for he had spent most of his time writing and avoiding college work. I enjoy knowing that he was as much a maverick as his characters have been. This novel certainly is a resounding response to the shifting social consciousness of that time, with an "identifiable youth culture" claiming its place within literature and the post-war women workforce showcased as economically and socially independent. The proper "Victorian maid" was now applying makeup in public, wearing short skirts, buying her own drinks, and one could always count on Fitzgerald to subtly note these social changes in his novel.

Fitzgerald has a flair for words and it resonates in this novel. The writing is more supple than I found in
The Beautiful and the Damned  even if characterization still remains a problem for this reader. Amory's relationship to his mother was a lure initially, as the story seemed to have this D.H. Lawrence sort of texture. Yet Amory's reactions to many events wasn't very motivating. The ambitious structure of the novel was also a distraction but the way in which Fitzgerald writes about wealth is in most instances unparalleled. When writing about rich people galavanting ceremoniously, the underpinnings are the immense fear of poverty, maybe even fear of people living in poverty, fear of ever becoming poor so that power is wielded to do damning things. In any case, Gatsby remains my favorite Fitzgerald novel.
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Calvi_
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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My musings on This side of Paradise:

Truthfully, I really don't know where to begin this review-of-sorts. I didn't Love this novel, not like The Great Gatsby but it is definitely a unique one. A fabulous start to a great writing career for F. Scott Fitzgerald.

This was his first novel and I can definitely see why it got the acclaim it did. The journey of self discovery is an often written of thing but seldom, in my experience, from a boy/man's POV. I'm not really sure why that is. I don't believe women are naturally more reflective than men or anything asinine like that but for whatever reason male self discovery books are more rare.

I won't say I liked Amory Blaine because I didn't. He's loathsomely selfish and egotistical through much, if not all, of the novel. He sees himself chiefly through others opinions of him which is usually detrimental. His sense of the romantic is actually a bit disturbing. Also, he seems to create definitions to words or behaviors that mostly have nothing to do with them.

That being said, despite the fact that the main character frustrated me greatly I enjoyed this novel. Fitzgerald's writing causes a great deal of reflection and internal philosophical debate. Through Blaine he delves into some interesting debates that make you question the world and it's nature at large. Anyone who can do that holds high stock with me.
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myheartsegg
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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I kept thinking: "this is pretty good for a 22 year old." I also kept thinking: "this book would never have been published today." I'm not asserting that as a truth about the book. I'm just saying I kept thinking it.

On almost every page I felt reminded that this novel was written by a young writer, someone who hadn't figured out quite how to pace a novel, or how to focus his themes, or how to deal with dramatic scenes without either short-changing them or turning them into bathos. World War I as narrative summary called "Interlude?" I don't care if Fitzgerald hadn't actually been to war--neither had Stephen Crane. Also the different structural choices and narrative voices from one section to the next don't feel like an author with mastery over the material, or an author making conscious choices. They feel like the author doesn't know what he is doing yet.

Almost because the book was such a startling mess to me, I loved the detail in the novel about Amory's reading habits. Throughout the book Fitzgerald assumes that a list of authors' names will telegraph to his readers Amory's current state of mind and maturity. Here is an example:

"He read enormously every night—Shaw, Chesterton, Barrie, Pinero, Yeats, Synge, Ernest Dowson, Arthur Symons, Keats, Sudermann, Robert Hugh Benson, the Savoy Operas—just a heterogeneous mixture, for he suddenly discovered that he had read nothing for years."

Of course these passing mentions of authors, some referred to just by last name because they were so well-known back then, can't have the same effect now as they did when Fitzgerald wrote the novel. Many of these authors are out of print or rarely read. But the references to books and authors in This Side of Paradise served to remind me of the mystery of literary endurance, and this became the question that preoccupied me, while reading it: Why do some books stay popular for a few months or years, and others are read for generations? This Side Of Paradise itself is now part of that mystery.
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