This Side of Paradise
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This Side of Paradise is the 1920 debut novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. It examines the lives and morality of carefree American youth at the dawn of the Jazz Age. Its protagonist, Amory Blaine, is a handsome middle-class student at Princeton University who dabbles in literature and engages in a series of unfulfilling romances with young women. The novel explores themes of love warped by greed and social ambition. Fitzgerald, who took inspiration for the title from a line in Rupert Brooke's poem Tiare Tahiti, spent years revising the novel before Charles Scribner's Sons accepted it for publication.
Following its publication in March 1920, This Side of Paradise became a sensation in the United States, and reviewers hailed it as an outstanding debut novel. The book went through twelve printings and sold 49,075 copies. Although the book neither became one of the ten best-selling novels of the year nor made him wealthy, F. Scott Fitzgerald became a household name overnight. His newfound fame enabled him to earn higher rates for his short stories, and his improved financial prospects persuaded his fiancée Zelda Sayre to marry him. His novel became especially popular among young Americans, and the press depicted its 23-year-old author as the standard-bearer for "youth in revolt".
Although Fitzgerald wrote the novel about the youth culture of 1910s America, the work became popularly and inaccurately associated with the carefree social milieu of post-war 1920s America, and social commentators touted Fitzgerald as the first writer to turn the national spotlight on the younger Jazz Age generation, particularly their flappers. In contrast to the older Lost Generation to which Gertrude Stein posited that Ernest Hemingway and Fitzgerald belonged, the Jazz Age generation were younger Americans who had been adolescents during World War I and mostly untouched by the conflict's horrors. Fitzgerald's novel riveted the nation's attention on the leisure activities of this hedonistic younger generation and sparked debate over their perceived immorality.
The novel created the widespread perception of Fitzgerald as a libertine chronicler of rebellious youth and proselytizer of Jazz Age hedonism which led reactionary societal figures to denounce the author and his work. These detractors regarded him as the outstanding aggressor in the rebellion of "flaming youth" against the traditional values of the "old guard". When Fitzgerald died in 1940, many social conservatives rejoiced. Due to this perception of Fitzgerald and his works, the Baltimore Diocese refused his family permission to bury him at St. Mary's Church in Rockville, Maryland.
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10X - 2022-10-14 00:00:00
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