This Side of Paradise

About the book

Amory Blaine grows up with a strong sense of his own promise and a restless interest in the forms that distinction might take. School, Princeton, friendship, reading, and romance offer successive stages on which to try out an identity. Fitzgerald allows that experimentation to affect the novel's form, moving between narrative, verse, letters, and dramatic exchanges. Amory's intelligence does not protect him from vanity, and his desire to understand himself repeatedly competes with his desire to appear interesting. War and changing social expectations complicate the future he imagines. The novel catches the exhilaration and uncertainty of youth through a character who keeps revising his interpretation of experience, asking whether disappointment can produce knowledge when self-dramatisation is itself such a powerful habit.

• Youth and identity
• Ambition
• Disillusionment

Why read it

For an adventurous early Fitzgerald novel that lets intellectual excitement and youthful self-importance occupy the same page.

English text