This Side of Paradise

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**This Side of Paradise**

A paperback edition of This Side of Paradise
Author	F. Scott Fitzgerald
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Novel
Publisher	Scribner
Released	1920
Media Type	Print (Hardcover and Paperback)
Pages	305 pp (first edition hardcover)
ISBN	NA

For other uses, see This Side of Paradise (disambiguation).

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.

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.

[edit] 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.