This Side of Paradise

Amory Blaine drifts from a privileged, indulged Minnesota childhood through Princeton and a string of romances that never quite become what he wants them to be, chasing a vague ideal of personal greatness that keeps dissolving into disillusionment every time he gets close to it. His mother dies while he is away at war, his family's fortune collapses soon after, and Amory returns to a New York that no longer has the money or the certainty his earlier ambitions had assumed would always be there. The novel follows him through a series of postwar false starts in the city before he finally wanders back to Princeton on foot, arriving at a hard won moment of self knowledge rather than any conventional success: he tells himself simply that he knows himself, and that this, alone, is all he has. The book ends there, with Amory standing at twilight, newly aware of both his own mortality and a kind of stripped down freedom in having nothing left to lose.

Fitzgerald wrote much of the novel in a deliberate bid to win back his fiancee Zelda Sayre, fusing his own autobiography with sharp, unsentimental observation of a restless postwar generation testing every convention it inherited. It reads fast and loosely structured, closer to a series of connected sketches than to a tightly built plot, and its energy comes less from incident than from Fitzgerald's own evident excitement at putting a new kind of young American onto the page for the first time.

Fitzgerald had fallen hard for the debutante Ginevra King during his Princeton years, only to be rejected by her family for lacking money, an experience that shaped Amory's romantic disappointments directly; Zelda herself dismissed his early prospects until the novel's acceptance changed her mind, and they married a week after it appeared.