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Type of bind: Paperback
EAN num: 9781605899411
ISBN number: 1605899410
Label: Quill Pen Classics
Manufacturer: Quill Pen Classics
Page Count: 272
Printing Date: October 21, 2008
Publishing house: Quill Pen Classics
Sale Popularity Level: 2611789
Studio: Quill Pen Classics
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Product Description:
This Side of Paradise is a book written by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is widely considered to be one of the top 100 greatest books of all time. This great novel will surely attract a whole new generation of readers. For many, This Side of Paradise is required reading for various courses and curriculums. And for others who simply enjoy reading timeless pieces of classic literature, this gem by F. Scott Fitzgerald is highly recommended. Published by Quill Pen Classics and beautifully produced, This Side of Paradise would make an ideal gift and it should be a part of everyone's personal library.
Amazon.com Review:
Fitzgerald's very first novel, reprinted in the handsome Everyman's Library series of literary classic, uses numerous formal experiments to tell the story of Amory Blaine, as he grows up during the crazy years following the First World War. It also contains a new introduction by Craig Raine that describes critical and popular reception of the book when it came out in 1920.
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Rated by buyers -
Man, I remember reading this when I was still a recalcitrant highschool student dreaming of the day when I would hit the road like Jack Kerouac, find some aspiring model to accompany me of course, publish a few poems here & there, maybe a couple novels, then get out of the game early, just like Rimbaud & disappear for ever in Africa. Well . . .
I remember picking up this book & reading it & thinking to myself `forget Holden Caulfield, man, this Amory Blaine cat is just like me!' I became enthralled with Fitzgerald & read every one of his books, short stories, letters, biographies. I even walked around w/ a picture of Scott & Zelda (in big bushy fur coat) on the cover of my binder. Fitzgerald's very first work, written hastily, after Zelda refused to marry him till he was published & had some dough in his pocket, is surely not one of his best. It's not even in the top 5, really, but a thoroughly good read for a young hep teenager who hasn't learnt how hard Life is yet, to whom the future is still wide open & international fame & riches only a few years away.
I had other friends read it too, at the time, & they liked it & identified w/ Fitzgerald's protagonist just like I did. Now they have office jobs, kids, mortgage payments, `a dwindling briefcase of enthusiasm' as Fitzgerald describes it. However, this guy is good. For all his romanticism, his obsession w/ the myth of elitism & fascination of old rich/new rich differences, this guy was good &p put down some of the most magical lines in American prose. Now, I'm too old & worn & bitter to read this guy anymore; I'm working my way through the Russians now (Dosty, Gorky, Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, Tolstoy, etc., etc), all of whom have slightly different enthusiasms & are less concerned with getting rich or laid than they are with, say, finding someplace warm to sleep or something edible.
As the global economy goes to, uh, Hell, the Zeitgeist will turn the public's attention away from novels dealing with rich spoiled Jazz-Age swingers, but hey, if you can find one bad line in `Gatsby,' even one, e-mail me w/ it & I'll give you a million bucks. I remember reading somewhere that Hunter S. Thompson referred to F. Scott Fitzgerald as a major influence on his early style. Course I remember lots of things.
Rizzob.com
Rated by buyers 
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This story is about Amory Blaine, a young man whose story we follow from his early childhood of great privilege through his college graduation to see him develop a great skepticism. It may have been his life's great economic downturn, maybe it was his poor luck at love, or maybe a mix of these and more led Amory to his new perspective. As readers we feel sorry for what has been forced to endure, but the silver lining comes as Amory and his mates discuss love, politics and growing up. The opinions they share are substantial, eye-opening, and they still ring true generations later.
This book was recommended to me a few years back by a friend. I asked her what her favorite book was and this was her response. It obviously took me awhile to get around to reading it, but I am glad I did. Better late than never, as they say.
I feel the book is best broken up into three sections: pre-college, college and post-college. And the very first and third sections were my favorites. The pre-college section covers his childhood as Fitzgerald writes him as an Elizabethan "mack daddy." I laughed continuously as the young man with the silver tongue would, always minding his manners, endeavor to seduce any woman he encountered.
The college section, which is the majority of the book, we begin to see the transformation of Amory Blaine. Through a group of friends that I found similar to the Dead Poets Society from the movie of the same name, Amory begins to finally see pain, suffering and injustice. He is handed a social conscience and wears it from then on as a badge of courage. This section of the book grew a little monotonous for me and was where I had to strengthen my resolve to get through it.
The post-college section, though somewhat pessimistic, was my favorite part of the book. In this final few chapters to the book I believe I found why my friend had recommended it. While I agreed with some of Amory's arguments at the end of the book and disagreed with others, I found them all to have merit. I must admit that I am even depressed that many of Amory's complaints about the state of society still plague society today. I applaud the author for writing a book that is still relevant so many years later.
This Side of Paradise is a short book where you may breeze through the beginning, lose interest in the middle, and become somewhat empassioned towards the end. I did not love this book, but I enjoyed parts of it a good deal. I'm glad to have now read some Fitzgerald other than just The Great Gatsby.
Rated by buyers 
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Fitzgerald's brilliant, serious, and triumphant very first novel can be summarized as follows: Bittersweet experience transmutes Amory Blaine's youthful enthusiasm for wealth and romance and art into a mature understanding of self and of the need to serve others.
Fitzgerald is a watercolorist, not an oil painter. He conveys meaning with deft gestures that allow a part (of a room, a person, a conversation, etc.) to suggest the whole. His insights into the social dynamics of wealth, romance, and art dazzle the reader from the very first page to the last.
This Side of Paradise isn't a perfect novel, but it is a very fine very first novel and a timeless one, and anyone lucky enough these days to read it before reading The Great Gatsby will enjoy Gatsby all the more. The book ends with one of the finest final sentences in all of western literature.
Rated by buyers -
It's an enormous comfort to find that the 24 year old Fitzgerald did not produce a perfect novel. It's not as comforting to know that the 29 year old Fitzgerald did. Ah well, the Beatles were done being the Beatles before they were 30.
This book is no pleasure to read unless you're interested in seeing FSF develop, and this is his start. This is an interesting lens on Gatsby and reveals some of the more subtle techniques by being used crudely here. The primary similarity is the use of satire in the real old Satyricon sense. In both novels, there's a devoted endeavor to meticulously record his surrounding in order to hold their trappings up to ridicule.
The problem with This Side of Paradise is that it's a bildungsroman and a fairly autobiographical one at that. The self-criticism and self-knowledge that is necessary to declare one's own quest for adulthood as absurd isn't available to one immediately upon entering it (See Stephen in Ulysses for a successful version - decades older). That's sort of the problem with the whole work. F keeps falling in and out of admiration for Amory, and consequently, Amory is never a reliable lens on his world. It's kind of a wreck.
This book made Maxwell Perkins's career at Scribner, and so TSOP could be said to have been crucial to the development of Hemingway, Wolfe, et al. What made Perkins think that this was so revolutionary? Perhaps some was scandalous - She's been kissed many times! - it's not so shocking now. Perhaps it showed a world not seen before, St. Paul's, Princeton. Perhaps he was the very first voice of a generation. Maybe Perkins just had an unbelievable eye for talent. The evidence is there if you look hard enough. It's up to the duly warned potential reader to decide whether they want to.
However, as an inspiration to young writers out there. Get going. Write a bad book. Write another bad book. Then write a great one.
Rated by buyers -
F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels are a one trick pony in the sense that he writes about the same time period (the 1920's), the same kind of people (rich or successful Americans) and protagonists who suffer the same fate (men whose ultimate failures are the result of their own shortcomings and the influence of women). His works are also highly autobiographical. Thus to read Fitzgerald with understanding one should start at the beginning (This Side of Paradise), move to the full bloom of his talent (The Great Gatsby) and culminate at the end (Tender is the Night). It would help to read a good biography along the way. The other option is to just read Gatsby which is one of the finest American novels ever written.
This Side of Paradise is his very first novel and here we see both the promise of the character, Amory Blaine, and the author. On the very very first page of the novel Fitzgerald displays his talent for words in his description of Amory's mother: "All in all Beatrice O'Hara absorbed the sort of education that will be quite impossible ever again; a tutelage measured by the number of things and people one could be contemptuous of and charming about; a culture rich in all the arts and traditions barren of all ideas in the last of those days when the great gardener clipped the inferior roses to produce one perfect bud." This lengthy sentence, despite its seeming awkwardness, tells us all we need to know about Beatrice and suggests that the son will share the same qualities. Other examples of Fitzgerald's facility with words follow. On page 45 he describes Isabelle thusly: "She paused at the top of the staircase. The sensations attributed to divers on springboards, leading ladies on opening nights, and lumpy, husky young men on the day of the Big Game, crowded through her. She should have descended to a burst of drums or a discordant blend of themes from `Thais' and `Carmen.' She had never been so curious about her appearance, she had never been so satisfied with it. She has been sixteen years old for six months." And on page 47 is Isabelle's description of Amory: "she had expected him to be dark and of garter-advertisement slenderness." Only Fitzgerald could come up with such vivid and evocative descriptions.
One fault of the book is that it is too episodic without clear transitions. First Amory is a child, then a student at Princeton, then a soldier (although we really do not see this part of this life and it seems to have not affected him), then a lover of Rosalind, then at loose ends, then has a relationship with Eleanor, then the book ends with Amory alone in the world and spouting socialist maxims. It is hard to picture this individual, who for 200 pages has been totally absorbed with himself, suddenly developing a social conscience!
Another problem I have is that Fitzgerald tries too hard to show his education. The book is full of poetry and literary references. It is written much as a college student would write a paper to try to impress the professor and thus get a high grade, rather than in a manner that is appropriate to the telling of a story. Fitzgerald is, of course, at this point in his life not far removed from Princeton and perhaps is still writing as a college student.
In the end, then, we should read This Side of Paradise for the beauty of the language and not be overly concerned with the story line and characters.
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