This Side of Paradise
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- For the Star Trek episode of the same name, see This Side of Paradise (Star Trek).
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This Side of Paradise is the debut novel of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Published in 1920, the book examines the lives and morality of post-World War I youth. Its protagonist, Amory Blaine, is a wealthy and attractive Princeton University student who dabbles in literature and has a series of romances. In his later novels, Fitzgerald would further develop the book's theme of love warped by greed and status-seeking.
Many consider Amory Blaine to be at least partially based on Fitzgerald himself, who also attended Princeton University before joining the Army.
Widely considered to be one of Fitzgerald's weaker works because of his relative inexperience and youth at the time of writing, This Side of Paradise is nonetheless a work of great literary merit.
The novel's original 1920 publication by Scribner's sparked Fitzgerald's stardom. With its success as proof of his means, Fitzgerald was able to marry Montgomery socialite Zelda Sayre.
Excerpt from the novel (Book 1: The Romantic Egotist, Chapter 1: Amory, Son of Beatrice):
Amory Blaine inherited from his mother every trait, except the stray inexpressible few, that made him worth while. His father, an ineffectual, inarticulate man with a taste for Byron and a habit of drowsing over the Encyclopedia Britannica, grew wealthy at thirty through the death of two elder brothers, successful Chicago brokers, and in the first flush of feeling that the world was his, went to Bar Harbor and met Beatrice O'Hara. In consequence, Stephen Blaine handed down to posterity his height of just under six feet and his tendency to waver at crucial moments, these two abstractions appearing in his son Amory. For many years he hovered in the background of his family's life, an unassertive figure with a face half-obliterated by lifeless, silky hair, continually occupied in "taking care" of his wife, continually harassed by the idea that he didn't and couldn't understand her.
See also
External links
- Template:Gutenberg
- Online text of This Side of Paradise (http://www.litfix.com/fitzgerald/onlinetexts/paradise/index.htm)