Related Directory Categories
Sources
Help build the largest human-edited directory on the web.
Submit a site - Become an editor
Wikipedia. Licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Are you an expert in this subject? Join the discussion and share your knowledge at Wikipedia.org.
This Side of Paradise
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 Dust jacket cover of first edition; illustration by W. E. Hill. |
|
| Author | F. Scott Fitzgerald |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Scribner |
| Publication date | 1920 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover and Paperback) |
| Pages | 305 pp (first edition hardcover) |
| ISBN | NA |
This Side of Paradise is the debut novel of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Published in 1920, and taking its title from a line of the Rupert Brooke poem Tiare Tahiti, 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 that eventually lead to his disillusionment. 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, like Amory, attended Princeton University before joining the Army. Also, Fitzgerald named the protagonist in his novel "This Side of Paradise" Amory Blaine in reference to Hobey Baker, a member of Princeton's class of 1914. Baker was a star athlete in football and hockey who died in a plane crash just weeks after the end of the war in Europe in 1918.
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.
(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.
- This Side of Paradise, available at Project Gutenberg.
- This Side of Paradise (alternate). New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1922. Scanned book from Internet Archive.
|
|
||
|---|---|---|
| Novels: | This Side of Paradise ♦ The Beautiful and Damned ♦ The Great Gatsby ♦ Tender Is the Night ♦ The Love of the Last Tycoon |  |
| Short story collections: | ||
| Short stories: | ||
| Books: | The Crack-Up | |