This Side of Paradise

Speaking with the enthusiasm of youth yet haunted by poetic romanticism, This Side of Paradise, 23-year-old F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1st novel, became a cause célèbre upon publication. It was at that moment in April 1920 that the Roaring Twenties— characterized by bold, beautiful flappers & slick-haired handsome young men—knew its tumultuous birth. The misadventures of Amory Blaine as he travels through the various stages of egotism along the road to a sense of self-truth set the tone for a generation on a similar path, wringing the most out of life in the midst of the "gayest & gaudiest spree in history!" Of This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald said it took "To write it—three months. To conceive it—three minutes. To collect the data in it—all my life....My idea is always to reach my generation. A wise writer, I think, writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, & the schoolmasters of ever afterward."