This Side of Paradise: With the Introductory Essay 'The Jazz Age Literature of the Lost Generation' (Read & Co. Classics Edition)

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Overview

F. Scott Fitzgerald's debut novel, This Side of Paradise, is a semi-autobiographical portrait of the disillusioned Lost Generation of America's Jazz Age.

Amory Blaine holds a mirror to F. Scott Fitzgerald's own youth as he attends prep school before studying at Princeton University. The semi-autobiographical novel continues as Amory returns home for Christmas break and falls in love with a beautiful debutante, Isabelle Borgé. After serving with the US Army in the First World War, the aspirational young man continues to embark on a series of romantic flings with numerous flapper girls as he struggles to find a purpose for his crumbling life.

In this debut novel, Fitzgerald masterfully illustrates the disoriented youth of the post-war generation and highlights the self-destructive effects of chasing wealth and enlightenment. This Side of Paradise was first published in 1920 and is now in a new edition featuring an introductory author biography alongside an essay on Jazz Age literature. Not to be missed by collectors of Fitzgerald's work and those interested in the Lost Generation writers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781447402787
Publisher:	Read & Co. Classics
Publication date:	04/22/2011
Pages:	310
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and educated at the Newman School and at Princeton. This Side of Paradise, his first novel, was published in 1920 and transformed him virtually overnight into a spokesman for his generation and a prophet of the Jazz Age. That same year, he married Zelda Sayre, and the two became America’s most celebrated expatriates, dividing their time between New York, Paris, and the Riviera during the twenties. Fitzgerald’s most famous novel, The Great Gatsby, was published in 1925, and Tender Is the Night in 1934. After Scott and Zelda were forced by money and health problems to return to the United States, Fitzgerald became a writer for Hollywood movie studios.  He died while working on his unfinished novel of Hollywood, The Last Tycoon. His other works include Flappers and Philosophers (1920), The Beautiful and Damned (1922), Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), All the Sad Young Men (1926), and Taps at Reveille (1935).

The country’s leading authority on F. Scott Fitzgerald for more than five decades, Matthew J. Bruccoli was born in the Bronx in 1931. He was Emily Brown Jefferies Distinguished Professor at the University of South Carolina and author or editor of more than fifty books, including the standard Fitzgerald biography, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur. Among his other subjects were Ernest Hemingway, John O’Hara, Thomas Wolfe, James Gould Cozzens, and Ross Macdonald, and he edited the letters and notebooks of Vladimir Nabokov. He died in 2008.

Date of Birth:

September 24, 1896

Date of Death:

December 21, 1940

Place of Birth:

St. Paul, Minnesota

Education:

Princeton University

Read an Excerpt

Book One

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 Encyclopaedia 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.

But Beatrice Blaine! There was a woman! Early pictures taken on her father's estate at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, or in Rome at the Sacred Heart Convent—an educational extravagance that in her youth was only for the daughters of the exceptionally wealthy—showed the exquisite delicacy of her features, the consummate art and simplicity of her clothes. A brilliant education she had her youth passed in renaissance glory, she was versed in the latest gossip of the Older Roman Families; known by name as a fabulously wealthy American girl to Cardinal Vitori and Queen Margherita and more subtle celebrities that one must have had some culture evento have heard of. She learned in England to prefer whiskey and soda to wine, and her small talk was broadened in two senses during a winter in Vienna. All in all Beatrice O'Hara absorbed the sort of education that will be quite impossible ever again; a tutelage measured by the number of things and people one could be contemptuous of and charming about; a culture rich in all arts and traditions, barren of all ideas, in the last of those days when the great gardener clipped the inferior roses to produce one perfect bud.

In her less important moments she returned to America, met Stephen Blaine and married himthis almost entirely because she was a little bit weary, a little bit sad. Her only child was carried through a tiresome season and brought into the world on a spring day in ninety-six.

When Amory was five he was already a delightful companion for her. He was an auburn-haired boy, with great, handsome eyes which he would grow up to in time, a facile imaginative mind and a taste for fancy dress. From his fourth to his tenth year he did the country with his mother in her father's private car, from Coronado, where his mother became so bored that she had a nervous breakdown in a fashionable hotel, down to Mexico City, where she took a mild, almost epidemic consumption. This trouble pleased her, and later she made use of it as an intrinsic part of her atmosphere especially after several astounding bracers.

So, while more or less fortunate little rich boys were defying governesses on the beach at Newport, or being spanked or tutored or read to from "Do and Dare," or "Frank on the Mississippi," Amory was biting acquiescent bell-boys in the Waldorf, outgrowing a natural repugnance to chamber music and symphonies, and deriving a highly specialized education from his mother.

"Amory."

"Yes, Beatrice." (Such a quaint name for his mother; she encouraged it.)"Dear, don't think of getting out of bed yet. I've always suspected that early rising in early life makes one nervous. Clothilde is having your breakfast brought up."

"All right."

"I am feeling very old today, Amory," she would sigh, her face a rare cameo of pathos, her voice exquisitely modulated, her hands as facile as Bernhardt's. "My nerves are on edge—on edge. We must leave this terrifying place tomorrow and go searching for sunshine."Amory's penetrating green eyes would look out through tangled hair at his mother. Even at this age he had no illusions about her.

"Amory."

"Oh, yes."

"I want you to take a red-hot bath—as hot as you can bear it, and just relax your nerves. You can read in the tub if you wish."

She fed him sections of the "Fetes Galantes" before he was ten; at eleven he could talk glibly, if rather reminiscently, of Brahms and Mozart and Beethoven. One afternoon, when left alone in the hotel at Hot Springs, he sampled his mother's apricot cordial, and as the taste pleased him, he became quite tipsy. This was fun for a while, but he essayed a cigarette in his exaltation, and succumbed to a vulgar, plebeian reaction. Though this incident horrified Beatrice, it also secretly amused her and became part of what in a later generation would have been termed her "line."

"This son of mine," he heard her tell a room full of awestruck, admiring women one day, "is entirely sophisticated and quite charming—but delicate—we're all delicate; here, you know." Her hand was radiantly outlined against her beautiful bosom; then sinking her voice to a whisper, she told them of the apricot cordial.

Table of Contents

Chronology of composition; Introduction; 1. Beginnings; 2. Composition; 3. Ending; 4. Revision and typing; 5. Submission and publication; 6. Editorial principles; This Side of Paradise; Record of variants; Later alterations; Explanatory notes; Quotations; Appendices.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Chicago Tribune Bears the impress of genius...splendid and fascinating.

Reading Group Guide

1. In her introduction, Susan Orlean says that, like everything else Fitzgerald wrote, This Side of Paradise is “a treatise about class.” Do you agree? How does Fitzgerald’s preoccupation with class inform his writing? Why is Amory so obsessed with social status?

2. Many critics have dismissed the novel’s episodic structure. What do you think of Fitzgerald’s organization of plot and theme? Does his arrangement, or lack thereof, in any way effectively convey the restlessness of Amory and his contemporaries? What did you ultimately come away with at the novel’s conclusion?

3. Discuss the importance of all things romantic in the novel. Are the romantic pursuits of Amory and his friends primarily satisfying or disillusioning? How does money, or the lack of it, play a part in the pursuit of love? Would you characterize Amory as cynical about love?

4. When first published, This Side of Paradise defined and catalyzed the youth movement of the 1920s. How does Fitzgerald’s forthrightness on the vagaries of youth in 1920 strike you as a reader today?

5. At the conclusion of the novel, Fitzgerald describes a new generation “grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.” To what extent is this true? What part does World War I play in the consciousness and actions of Fitzgerald’s characters?

6. Discuss the significance of religion in the novel. Amory often raises questions of faith, good versus evil, and sacrifice. What does he conclude? What role does Monsignor Darcy play in Amory’s developing moral identity? What is Amory’s vocation?

7. Is This Side ofParadise in any way a tragic novel? How does it attempt to explain tragedy or loss? Do you think Fitzgerald intended a mournful or ultimately hopeful perspective? Why or why not?

Foreword

1. In her introduction, Susan Orlean says that, like everything else Fitzgerald wrote, This Side of Paradise is “a treatise about class.” Do you agree? How does Fitzgerald’s preoccupation with class inform his writing? Why is Amory so obsessed with social status?

2. Many critics have dismissed the novel’s episodic structure. What do you think of Fitzgerald’s organization of plot and theme? Does his arrangement, or lack thereof, in any way effectively convey the restlessness of Amory and his contemporaries? What did you ultimately come away with at the novel’s conclusion?

3. Discuss the importance of all things romantic in the novel. Are the romantic pursuits of Amory and his friends primarily satisfying or disillusioning? How does money, or the lack of it, play a part in the pursuit of love? Would you characterize Amory as cynical about love?

4. When first published, This Side of Paradise defined and catalyzed the youth movement of the 1920s. How does Fitzgerald’s forthrightness on the vagaries of youth in 1920 strike you as a reader today?

5. At the conclusion of the novel, Fitzgerald describes a new generation “grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.” To what extent is this true? What part does World War I play in the consciousness and actions of Fitzgerald’s characters?

6. Discuss the significance of religion in the novel. Amory often raises questions of faith, good versus evil, and sacrifice. What does he conclude? What role does Monsignor Darcy play in Amory’s developing moral identity? What is Amory’s vocation?

7. Is This Side ofParadise in any way a tragic novel? How does it attempt to explain tragedy or loss? Do you think Fitzgerald intended a mournful or ultimately hopeful perspective? Why or why not?

Editorial Reviews

Fitzgerald's first novel, about a coterie of Princeton socialites, appears in a 75th anniversary edition. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

He was better than he knew, for in fact and in the literary sense he invented a generation.” —The New York Times

From the Publisher