This Side or Paradise. F. Scott Fitzgerald.

This Side of Paradise
F. Scott Fitzgerald
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons
1929 (1948)

Why read it? The contrast between the superficial college kid whose main interest was flirting with girls as he attends Princeton and world-weary, cynical, regretful, not-yet-thirty-year-old after serving as an officer in France during WWI. The novel is remarkable for its honest and detailed descriptions of the early "Jazz Age," the "Lost Generation." The book established Fitzgerald's reputation.

Some sample ideas from the Novel: Epigraph: "Experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes. Oscar Wilde." "I don't know why, but I think of all Harvard men as sissies, like I used to be, and all Yale men as wearing big blue sweaters and smoking pipes." "The slicker was good looking or clean-looking, he had brains, social brains, that is, and he used all means on the broad path of honesty to get ahead, be popular, and admired, and never in trouble." "I've got an adjective that just fits you--one of his favorite starts--he seldom had a word in mind, but it was a curiosity provoker, and he could always produce something complimentary if he got in a tight corner." "The chief characteristic of the big man seemed to be a great confidence in himself set off against a tremendous boredom with everything around him."

"I'm in a muddle about a lot of things--I've just discovered that I've a mind, and I'm starting to read." "But men will chatter and you and I will still shout our futilities to each other across the stage until the last silly curtain falls plump upon our bobbing heads." "American life is so damned dumb and stupid and healthy." "I'm restless as the devil and have a horror of getting fat or falling in love and growing domestic." "The education of all beautiful women is the knowledge of men."

About Rosaline: "But all criticism of Rosalind ends in her beauty." Rosaline: "When I meet a man that doesn't bore me to death after two weeks, perhaps it'll be different." "You've made me talk about myself...that's against the rules." "Men aged forty-five know life and are so adorably tired looking." "I have to be won over again every time you see me." "Clever men are usually so homely." "It may be an insane love affair, but it's not inane."

"Probably more than any concrete vice or failing, Amory despised his own personality--he loathed knowing that tomorrow and the thousand days after he would swell pompously at a compliment and sulk at an ill word." "He began for the first time in his life to have a strong distrust of all generalities and epigrams." "He found something that he wanted....not to be admired...not to be loved...but to be necessary to people, to be indispensable."

Quote: "If he can be educated to think clearly, concisely, and logically, freed of his habit of taking refuge in platitudes and prejudices and sentimentalisms."