Synopses & Reviews
THE ACCOMPLISHED AND HEARTBREAKING FIRST NOVEL THAT CATAPULTED F. SCOTT FITZGERALD TO LITERARY FAME AT THE AGE OF TWENTY-THREE
Considered scandalous (and brilliant) when it was published in 1920, This Side of Paradise describes the intellectual, spiritual, and sexual education of young Amory Blaine in the tumultuous America of the early twentieth century. Highly sophisticated yet hopelessly romantic, Amory flounders from prep school to Princeton to glittering Jazz Age New York, confident that he is destined for greatness but unsure how to go about it. Fitzgeralds razor-sharp re-creation of a defiant, disillusioned generation grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken” makes This Side of Paradise a timeless autobiographical novel of youth and alienation. It moves from tenderness to cynicism to hope with the grace and power that make Fitzgerald one of the greatest of American writers.
NOW INCLUDING THE AUTHORS CORRECTED TEXT
With an Introduction by Matthew J. Bruccoli
Synopsis
Amory Blaine, a handsome and spoiled Princeton student, makes his way through school and abroad, a life journey that culminates in his entry into the First World War and his emergence as a bitter and cynical product of his generation. Reissue.
Synopsis
First published in 1920, This Side of Paradise marks the beginning of the career of one of the greatest writers of the first half of the twentieth century. In this remarkable achievement, F. Scott Fitzgerald displays his unparalleled wit and keen social insight in his portrayal of college life through the struggles and doubts of Amory Blaine, a self-proclaimed genius with a love of knowledge and a penchant for the romantic. As Amory journeys into adulthood and leaves the aristocratic egotism of his youth behind, he becomes painfully aware of his lost innocence and the new sense of responsibility and regret that has taken its place.
Clever and wonderfully written, This Side of Paradise is a fascinating novel about the changes of the Jazz Age and their effects on the individual. It is a complex portrait of a versatile mind in a restless generation that reveals rich ideas crucial to an understanding of the 1920s and timeless truths about the human need for--and fear of--change.
"A very enlivening book indeed, a book really brilliant and glamorous, making as agreeable reading as could be asked . . . There are clever things, keen and searching things, amusingly young and mistaken things, beautiful things and pretty things . . . and truly inspired and elevated things, an astonishing abundance of each, in THIS SIDE OF PARADISE. You could call it the youthful Byronism that is normal in a man of the author's type, working out through a well-furnished intellect of unusual critical force."
--The Evening Post, 1920
"An astonishing and refreshing book . . . Mr. Fitzgerald has recorded with a good deal of felicity and a disarming frankness the adventures and developments of a curiousand fortunate American youth. . . . [It is] delightful and encouraging to find a novel which gives us in the accurate terms of intellectual honesty a reflection of American undergraduate life. At last the revelation has come. We have the constant young American occupation--the 'petting party'--frankly and humorously in our literature."
--The New Republic, 1920
Synopsis
Here is the accomplished first novel that catapulted F. Scott Fitzgerald to literary fame-at the age of 23. It follows the education-intellectual, spiritual, and sexual-of young Amory Blaine.
Synopsis
The classic novel of greed and vice from F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Set in an era of intoxicating excitement and ruinous excess, changing manners and challenged morals, F. Scott Fitzgeralds second novel chronicles the lives of Harvard-educated Anthony Patch and his beautiful, willful wife, Gloria. This bitingly ironic story eerily foretells the fate of the author and his own wife, Zeldafrom its giddy romantic beginnings to its alcohol-fueled demise. A portrait of greed, ambition, and squandered talent, The Beautiful and Damned depicts an America embarked on the greatest spree in its history, a world Fitzgerald saw with clearer eyes than any of his contemporaries.”* By turns hilarious, heartbreaking, and chillingly prophetic, it remains one of his best-known works, which Gertrude Stein correctly predicted will be read when many of his well-known contemporaries are forgotten.”
*Tobias Wolff
About the Author
F. Scott Fitzgerald (18961940) 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 Americas most celebrated expatriates, dividing their time between New York, Paris, and the Riviera during the twenties. Fitzgeralds 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 countrys 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 OHara, Thomas Wolfe, James Gould Cozzens, and Ross Macdonald, and he edited the letters and notebooks of Vladimir Nabokov. He died in 2008.