One of themost brilliant first novels in the history of American literature, the book that launched F. Scott Fitzgerald’s literary career.
Published in 1920, when the author was just twenty-three, This Side of Paradise recounts the education of a youth, and to this universal story Fitzgerald brings the promise of everything that was new in the vigorous, restless America of the years following World War I. Amory Blaine– egoistic, versatile, callow, and imaginative–inhabits a narrative interwoven with songs, poems, dramatic dialogue, questions and answers. His growth from self-absorption to sexual awareness and personhood is described with continuous improvisatory energy and delight. Fitzgerald’s formal inventiveness and verve heighten our sense that the world being described is our own, modern world.