This Side of Paradise

This Side of Paradise is the debut novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1920. The book examines the lives and morality of carefree American youth at the dawn of the Jazz Age. Its protagonist Amory Blaine is an attractive middle-class student at Princeton University who dabbles in literature and engages in a series of romances with flappers. The novel explores the theme of love warped by greed and status seeking, and takes its title from a line of Rupert Brooke's poem Tiare Tahiti. With This Side of Paradise Fitzgerald became the first writer to turn the national spotlight upon the so-called Jazz Age generation. In contrast to the older Lost Generation to which Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway belonged, the Jazz Age generation were those younger Americans who had been adolescents during World War I and were largely untouched by the conflict's psychological and material horrors. Fitzgerald's novel riveted the nation's attention upon the leisure activities of their sons and daughters cavorting in the rumble seat of Bearcat roadster on a lonely road and sparked a societal debate over the younger generation's perceived immorality.