This Side of Paradise
by F. Scott Fitzgerald · first published 1920
29% recommend71% neutral
This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald's romantic and witty first novel, was written when the author was only twenty-three years old. This semi-autobiographical story of the handsome, indulged, and idealistic Princeton student Amory Blaine received critical raves and catapulted Fitzgerald to instant fame. Now, readers can enjoy the newly edited, authorized version of this early classic of the Jazz Age, based on Fitzgerald's original manuscript. In this definitive text, This Side of Paradise captures the rhythms and romance of Fitzgerald's youth and offers a poignant portrait of the "Lost G
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Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Joan Didion) Flowers for Algernon (Daniel Keyes) The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (Paul Zindel) The Things They Carried (Tim O' Brien) This Side of Paradise (F. Scott Fitzgerald) Something Wicked This Way Comes (Ray Bradbury) Essentially a children's sci-fi novel, but it doesn't read that way. A Moveable Feast (Ernest Hemingway) My personal favorite (along…
on “Ask HN: I have no commitments for the next 6 months – what books should I read?” ↗Gatsby is great, of course, but for me, "This Side of Paradise" is far better. Underappreciated.
on “Borne Back Ceaselessly into the Past: Fitzgerald, Gatsby and WWI” ↗Admittedly didn’t read This Side of Paradise until grad school. But I definitely am much more of a Fitzgerald and Hemingway person and have zero desire to revisit Salinger.
on “Did Salinger Go Awry?” ↗…pretty linear development out of early Joyce, say Dubliners and the first episodes of Ulysses. It compares to Woolf and McCarthy just fine. Your list reminds me of a joke from Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise: So Walter Arensberg, Alfred Kreymborg, Carl Sandburg, Louis Untermeyer, Eunice Tietjens, Clara Shanafelt, James Oppenheim, Maxwell Bodenheim, Richard Glaenzer, Scharmel Iris,…
on “The Great Gatsby is the most misunderstood novel” ↗…tells me that "many Fitzgerald scholars typically consider The Beautiful and Damned to be among the author's weaker novels," so maybe something excellent is waiting for me if I ever get around to reading This Side of Paradise or Tender is the Night.)
on “Who Is America's Homer?” ↗…shorter novels which are easier for the kids to read and relate to. I remember reading Cannery Row a few years ago and wondering why instead of Grapes of Wrath it wasn't assigned, or for that matter I read "This Side of Paradise" and am to this day 100% convinced that any teacher that assigns The Great Gatsby to a teenage student over it should seriously be examined (actually IIRC when I read it, it seemed the sexual content…
on “Why Read the Classics? (1986)” ↗^ best one-sentence summation of this book I've ever seen. "Catcher" and "This Side of Paradise" are kind of a binary system for studying the pathology of American youth culture.
on “Did Salinger Go Awry?” ↗