This Side of Paradise

Uncommon card · No. 118086

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...

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