Product Description

This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald's romantic and witty first novel, was written when the author was only twenty-three years old. This semiautobiographical story of the handsome, indulged, and idealistic Princeton student Amory Blaine received critical raves and catapulted Fitzgerald to instant fame. Now, readers can enjoy the newly edited, authorized version of this early classic of the Jazz Age, based on Fitzgerald's original manuscript. In this definitive text, This Side of Paradise captures the rhythms and romance of Fitzgerald's youth and offers a poignant portrait of the "Lost Generation."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #439324 in Books
• Published on: 1998-07-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Amazon.com Review
Fitzgerald's first novel, reprinted in the handsome Everyman's Library series of literary classic, uses numerous formal experiments to tell the story of Amory Blaine, as he grows up during the crazy years following the First World War. It also contains a new introduction by Craig Raine that describes critical and popular reception of the book when it came out in 1920.

From Publishers Weekly
Fitzgerald's first novel, about a coterie of Princeton socialites, appears in a 75th anniversary edition.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
The first novel that launched Fitzgerald to literary fame and glory in 1920 is now in the public domain and will undoubtedly be released by a number of publishers. These two editions represent both ends of the spectrum. The Cambridge edition is the latest in its ongoing series of corrected texts of Fitzgerald's work. Aimed at the scholarly audience, it includes an introduction, explanatory notes, and illustrations. The Penguin paperback also has an introduction but is a basic, no-frills edition, which is adequate for the casual reader. Serious American literature collections should stock the Cambridge text, which is probably the finest edition of this novel to date.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

The book is a little boring, but has some great writing.
This story is about Amory Blaine, a young man whose story we follow from his early childhood of great privilege through his college graduation to see him develop a great skepticism. It may have been his life's great economic downturn, maybe it was his poor luck at love, or maybe a mix of these and more led Amory to his new perspective. As readers we feel sorry for what has been forced to endure, but the silver lining comes as Amory and his mates discuss love, politics and growing up. The opinions they share are substantial, eye-opening, and they still ring true generations later.

This book was recommended to me a few years back by a friend. I asked her what her favorite book was and this was her response. It obviously took me awhile to get around to reading it, but I am glad I did. Better late than never, as they say.

I feel the book is best broken up into three sections: pre-college, college and post-college. And the first and third sections were my favorites. The pre-college section covers his childhood as Fitzgerald writes him as an Elizabethan "mack daddy." I laughed continuously as the young man with the silver tongue would, always minding his manners, attempt to seduce any woman he encountered.

The college section, which is the majority of the book, we begin to see the transformation of Amory Blaine. Through a group of friends that I found similar to the Dead Poets Society from the movie of the same name, Amory begins to finally see pain, suffering and injustice. He is handed a social conscience and wears it from then on as a badge of courage. This section of the book grew a little monotonous for me and was where I had to strengthen my resolve to get through it.

The post-college section, though somewhat pessimistic, was my favorite part of the book. In this final few chapters to the book I believe I found why my friend had recommended it. While I agreed with some of Amory's arguments at the end of the book and disagreed with others, I found them all to have merit. I must admit that I am even depressed that many of Amory's complaints about the state of society still plague society today. I applaud the author for writing a book that is still relevant so many years later.

This Side of Paradise is a short book where you may breeze through the beginning, lose interest in the middle, and become somewhat empassioned towards the end. I did not love this book, but I enjoyed parts of it a good deal. I'm glad to have now read some Fitzgerald other than just The Great Gatsby.

A brilliant, serious, and triumphant first novel
Fitzgerald's brilliant, serious, and triumphant first novel can be summarized as follows: Bittersweet experience transmutes Amory Blaine's youthful enthusiasm for wealth and romance and art into a mature understanding of self and of the need to serve others.

Fitzgerald is a watercolorist, not an oil painter. He conveys meaning with deft gestures that allow a part (of a room, a person, a conversation, etc.) to suggest the whole. His insights into the social dynamics of wealth, romance, and art dazzle the reader from the first page to the last.

This Side of Paradise isn't a perfect novel, but it is a very fine first novel and a timeless one, and anyone lucky enough these days to read it before reading The Great Gatsby will enjoy Gatsby all the more. The book ends with one of the finest final sentences in all of western literature.

Comforting
It's an enormous comfort to find that the 24 year old Fitzgerald did not produce a perfect novel. It's not as comforting to know that the 29 year old Fitzgerald did. Ah well, the Beatles were done being the Beatles before they were 30.

This book is no pleasure to read unless you're interested in seeing FSF develop, and this is his start. This is an interesting lens on Gatsby and reveals some of the more subtle techniques by being used crudely here. The primary similarity is the use of satire in the real old Satyricon sense. In both novels, there's a devoted attempt to meticulously record his surrounding in order to hold their trappings up to ridicule.

The problem with This Side of Paradise is that it's a bildungsroman and a fairly autobiographical one at that. The self-criticism and self-knowledge that is necessary to declare one's own quest for adulthood as absurd isn't available to one immediately upon entering it (See Stephen in Ulysses for a successful version - decades older). That's sort of the problem with the whole work. F keeps falling in and out of admiration for Amory, and consequently, Amory is never a reliable lens on his world. It's kind of a wreck.

This book made Maxwell Perkins's career at Scribner, and so TSOP could be said to have been crucial to the development of Hemingway, Wolfe, et al. What made Perkins think that this was so revolutionary? Perhaps some was scandalous - She's been kissed many times! - it's not so shocking now. Perhaps it showed a world not seen before, St. Paul's, Princeton. Perhaps he was the first voice of a generation. Maybe Perkins just had an unbelievable eye for talent. The evidence is there if you look hard enough. It's up to the duly warned potential reader to decide whether they want to.

However, as an inspiration to young writers out there. Get going. Write a bad book. Write another bad book. Then write a great one.