This Side of Paradise

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s romantic and witty first novel—written when he was only twenty-three years old and catapulted Fitzgerald to instant fame—is now available in a beautifully designed special collector’s edition.

This Side of Paradise is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s debut novel. The book’s critical success was driven in part by the enthusiasm of reviewers, and it catapulted Fitzgerald to instant fame. H. L. Mencken wrote that is was the “best American novel that I have seen of late.” An examination of the lives and morality of post-World War I youth, this semiautobiographical story of the handsome, indulged, and idealistic Princeton student Amory Blaine brilliantly captures the rhythms and romance of Fitzgerald’s university days and offers a poignant portrait of the Lost Generation.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896. He attended Princeton University, joined the United States Army during World War I, and published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920. That same year he married Zelda Sayre and for the next decade the couple lived in New York, Paris, and on the Riviera. Fitzgerald’s masterpieces include The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night. He died at the age of forty-four while working on The Last Tycoon. Fitzgerald’s fiction has secured his reputation as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century.