This Side of Paradise (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read online

  Table of Contents

  FROM THE PAGES OF THIS SIDE OF PARADISE

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

  THE WORLD OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD AND THIS SIDE OF PARADISE

  Introduction

  Praise

  Dedication

  BOOK ONE - THE ROMANTIC EGOTIST

  CHAPTER ONE - Amory, Son of Beatrice

  A Kiss For Amory

  Snapshots of the Young Egotist

  Code of the Young Egotist

  Preparatory to the Great Adventure

  The Egotist Down

  Incident of the Well-Meaning Professor

  Incident of the Wonderful Girl

  Heroic in General Tone

  The Philosophy of the Slicker

  CHAPTER TWO - Spires and Gargoyles

  A Damp Symbolic Interlude

  Historical

  ‘Ha-Ha Hortense!“

  “Petting”

  Descriptive

  Isabelle

  Babes in the Woods

  Carnival

  Under the Arc-Light

  Crescendo!

  CHAPTER THREE - The Egotist Considers

  The Superman Grows Careless

  Aftermath

  Financial

  First Appearance of the Term “Personage”

  The Devil

  In the Alley

  At the Window

  CHAPTER FOUR - Narcissus Off Duty

  Amory Writes a Poem

  Still Calm

  Clara

  Amory Is Resentful

  The End ofmany Things

  INTERLUDE - May, 1917-February, 1919

  Embarking at Night

  BOOK TWO - THE EDUCATION OF A PERSONAGE

  CHAPTER ONE - The Débutante

  Several Hours Later

  Kismet

  A Little Interlude

  Bitter Sweet

  Aquatic Incident

  Five Weeks Later

  CHAPTER TWO - Experiments in Convalescence

  Still Alcoholic

  Amory on the Labor Question

  A Little Lull

  Temperature Normal

  Restlessness

  Tom the Censor

  Looking Backward

  Another Ending

  CHAPTER THREE - Young Irony

  September

  The End of Summer

  CHAPTER FOUR - The Supercilious Sacrifice

  The Collapse of Several Pillars

  CHAPTER FIVE - The Egotist Becomes a Personage

  In the Drooping Hours

  Still Weeding

  Monsignor

  The Big Man with Goggles

  Amory Coins a Phrase

  Going Faster

  The Little Man Gets His

  “Out of the Fire, Out of the Little Room”

  ENDNOTES

  INSPIRED BY THIS SIDE OF PARADISE

  COMMENTS & QUESTIONS

  FOR FURTHER READING

  FROM THE PAGES OF

  THIS SIDE OF PARADISE

  “I want to go to Princeton,” said Amory. “I don’t know why, but I think of all Harvard men as sissies, like I used to be, and all Yale men as wearing big blue sweaters and smoking pipes.” (pages 24-25)

  He was resentful against all those in authority over him, and this, combined with a lazy indifference toward his work, exasperated every master in school. (page 27)

  D’Invilliers was partially taken in and wholly delighted. In a good-natured way he had almost decided that Princeton was one part deadly Philistines and one part deadly grinds, and to find a person who could mention Keats without stammering, yet evidently washed his hands, was rather a treat. (page 48)

  “You’ve just had your eyes opened to the snobbishness of the world in a rather abrupt manner. Princeton invariably gives the thoughtful man a social sense.” (page 78)

  “He’s the first contemporary I’ve ever met whom I’ll admit is my superior in mental capacity.” (page 121)

  All life was transmitted into terms of their love, all experience, all desires, all ambitions, were nullified—their senses of humor crawled into corners to sleep; their former love-affairs seemed faintly laughable and scarcely regretted juvenalia. (page 175)

  “It’s just—us. We’re pitiful, that’s all. The very qualities I love you for are the ones that will always make you a failure.” (page 181)

  “Any rich, unprogressive old party with that particularly grasping, acquisitive form of mentality known as financial genius can own a paper that is the intellectual meat and drink of thousands of tired, hurried men, men too involved in the business of modern living to swallow anything but predigested food. For two cents the voter buys his politics, prejudices, and philosophy.” (page 201)

  Probably more than any concrete vice or failing Amory despised his own personality—he loathed knowing that to-morrow and the thousand days after he would swell pompously at a compliment and sulk at an ill word like a third-rate musician or a first-class actor. (page 242)

  “Yes—I was perhaps an egotist in youth, but I soon found it made me morbid to think too much about myself” (page 243)

  He found something that he wanted ... not to be admired, as he had feared; not to be loved, as he had made himself believe; but to be necessary to people, to be indispensable; he remembered the sense of security he had found in Burne. (page 247)

  “Very few things matter and nothing matters very much.” (page 247)

  “I’m restless. My whole generation is restless. I’m sick of a system where the richest man gets the most beautiful girl if he wants her, where the artist without an income has to sell his talents to a button manufacturer.” (page 256)

  “I know myself,” he cried, “but that is all.” (page 261)

  Published by Barnes & Noble Books

  122 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10011

  www.barnesandnoble.com/classics

  This Side of Paradise was first published in 1920.

  Published in 2005 by Barnes & Noble Classics with new Introduction,

  Notes, Biography, Chronology, Inspired By, Comments & Questions,

  and For Further Reading.

  Introduction, Notes, and For Further Reading

  Copyright © 2005 by Sharon G. Carson.

  Note on F. Scott Fitzgerald, The World of F. Scott Fitzgerald

  and This Side of Paradise, Inspired by This Side of Paradise,

  and Comments & Questions

  Copyright © 2005 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced

  or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including

  photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system,

  without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Barnes & Noble Classics and the Barnes & Noble Classics

  colophon are trademarks of Barnes & Noble, Inc.

  This Side of Paradise

  ISBN-13: 978-1-59308-243-7 ISBN-10: 1-59308-243-6

  eISBN : 978-1-411-43327-4

  LC Control Number 2005922122

  Produced and published in conjunction with:

  Fine Creative Media, Inc.

  322 Eighth Avenue

  New York, NY 10001

  Michael J. Fine, President and Publisher

  Printed in the United States of America

  QM

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  FIRST PRINTING

  F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

  Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul,
Minnesota, on September 24, 1896, to Edward and Mollie McQuillan Fitzgerald. His father was an unsuccessful businessman who came from an old family with roots in Maryland. His mother was the daughter of an Irish immigrant who built a successful wholesale grocery business in St. Paul. Scott was named after his father’s distant cousin, the author of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and his mother was proud of the family connection to the Keys. Before Scott reached school age his father’s wicker furniture factory had failed, and the family moved to upstate New York to follow Edward’s sales job with Proctor and Gamble. In 1908 Edward lost his position, and the family moved back to St. Paul; from that point on McQuillan money supported them.

  At a young age, Scott showed a talent for writing: At thirteen he published his first story in his school journal. And while studying at an elite Catholic prep school in New Jersey he published three stories and wrote several plays. Fitzgerald enrolled in Princeton University in 1913, where he contributed to campus magazines and wrote scripts and lyrics for campus musicals. His devotion to extracurricular activities forced him to leave Princeton because of poor grades. After America entered World War I, he enlisted in the army; while stationed at a military camp in Kansas, he began writing The Romantic Egotist, his first novel.

  Discharged from the army after the war (having never seen active service), Fitzgerald revised his novel and renamed it This Side of Paradise; it was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1920. That same year Scott married the willful, unpredictable Zelda Sayre, whom he had met in 1918 after being transferred to an army base in Alabama. Fitzgerald’s first novel—immensely popular with the war generation—brought him instant fame, although many critics of the day debated its literary merits. He quickly developed notoriety as a carouser and a playboy—impressions he did little to diminish—but his reputation for heavy drinking and continual partying belied his writerly discipline, as evidenced by meticulous revisions of his novels and the numerous short stories he wrote throughout his life. In 1922 he followed his successful debut as a novelist with The Beautiful and Damned, a tale about a couple whose lives end in dissipation while they sue for a large inheritance. With his early works Fitzgerald explored a theme he would return to repeatedly: the effects of wealth and power on the people who possess them.

  Scott and Zelda and their daughter, Scottie, lived a peripatetic life for many years, settling in Europe for periods and then residing in America. In Paris Fitzgerald met Ernest Hemingway and other American expatriate writers whom Gertrude Stein was to dub the “lost generation.”

  In 1925 Fitzgerald published his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby. Written while the author was living in the French Riviera, the story of the parvenu Jay Gatsby was more a critical success than a financial one, and Fitzgerald continued to support his extravagant lifestyle through frequent, and well-paid, magazine contributions. But his literary fortunes changed following publication of The Great Gatsby. Although he published a collection of short stories in 1926, he did not produce another book until 1934, when Tender Is the Night, which he had labored on for years, was published. Meanwhile, his domestic life deteriorated as Zelda became increasingly unstable and Fitzgerald sank deeper into alcoholism. Zelda’s emotional collapse in 1930 was precipitated by maniacally intense ballet studies; the remaining years of her life were spent in and out of hospitals.

  Tender Is the Night was a commercial failure and received mixed reviews from the critics. Fitzgerald spent the years following its publication drunk and dissolute; he chronicled this period in the “Crack-Up” essays. His literary fame diminished, he worked as a Hollywood scriptwriter and wrote short stories; in 1939 he began work on his final novel, The Last Tycoon, about Hollywood life. By then he was living with Sheilah Graham, a Hollywood gossip columnist, with whom he would spend the rest of his life. Before The Last Tycoon was completed, F. Scott Fitzgerald died of a heart attack, on December 21,1940, at the age of forty-four. The Last Tycoon was published in 1941; its writing style is considered as fine as the best of Fitzgerald’s other work.

  THE WORLD OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD AND THIS SIDE OF PARADISE

  1896 Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald is born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, the only son of Edward, a genteel, unsuccessful factory owner, and Mary (“Mollie”) McQuillan, the daughter of an Irish immigrant who became a successful wholesale grocer in St. Paul. He is named after his father’s distant cousin, the author of the “Star-Spangled Banner.”

  1898 Commercial failures force Edward to move his family to Buffalo, New York, where he takes a sales job with Proctor and Gamble.

  1899 Sigmund Freud publishes Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams); the first edition carries the publication date 1900.

  1901 Edward Fitzgerald is relocated with his family to Syracuse, New York.

  1905 Einstein publishes significant physics papers, including one on the special theory of relativity.

  1907 Artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque begin to develop cubism, an important new visual arts style.

  1908 Edward Fitzgerald loses his job at Proctor and Gamble, and the family returns to St. Paul, where they are supported by Mollie’s inheritance. F. Scott Fitzgerald enters St. Paul’s Academy.

  1909 Fitzgerald’s first published story, “The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage,” appears in his school journal.

  1911 Fitzgerald enters the Newman School, an elite Catholic prep school in Hackensack, New Jersey. During his three years at Newman, he publishes three stories in the school literary magazine and writes and produces several plays. He meets Father Sigourney Fay, who recognizes and encourages his talents.

  1912 C. G. Jung publishes Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (The Psychology of the Unconscious).

  1913 He graduates from the Newman School and is accepted at Princeton University, despite an unexceptional academic record. At Princeton he befriends Edmund Wilson (who will become a critic and author) and John Peale Bishop (who will become a poet and novelist). Fitzgerald spends much of his time in extracurricular activities, including writing scripts and lyrics for the Triangle Club, Princeton’s drama club. D. H. Lawrence publishes Sons and Lovers.

  1914 World War I begins.

  1915 Fitzgerald meets and falls in love with Ginevra King, a young girl from a wealthy Chicago family. His affair with Ginevra, who is possibly a model for some of his fictional characters, amounts to several dates and a ream of passionate letters. Fitzgerald’s extracurricular activities take a toll on his grades, and he leaves Princeton, ostensibly because of illness. Europe is engulfed by war.

  1916 Fitzgerald returns to Princeton.

  1917 His relationship with Ginevra dies down. In January Fitzgerald. publishes The Debutante, a play inspired by his affair with her, in the Nassau Literary Magazine. America declares war against Germany, and Fitzgerald enlists in the army as a second lieutenant. He is stationed in Fort Leavenworth , Kansas, and begins writing a novel, The Romantic Egotist. T. S. Eliot publishes Prufrock and Other Observations.

  1918 On leave from the army, Fitzgerald returns to Princeton and completes his novel. His mentor, author Shane Leslie, recommends it to Scribner’s. Fitzgerald is stationed first in Georgia and then near Montgomery, Alabama, where he meets Zelda Sayre, the wayward daughter of an Alabama state Supreme Court judge. His novel is rejected. World War I ends; Fitzgerald never sees active service.

  1919 Fitzgerald is discharged from the army and becomes engaged to Zelda. Although he finds work in a New York advertising agency, Zelda breaks off their engagement, worried about his financial prospects. Fitzgerald returns to his parents’ house, where he rewrites his novel; retitled This Side of Paradise, it is accepted for publication by Scribner’s. Prohibition begins.

  1920 Fitzgerald and Zelda renew their engagement. He publishes stories in the Saturday Evening Post and Smart Set. This Side of Paradise is published. Scott and Zelda are married in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. The newlyweds move to Westport, Connecticut, where Fitzgerald works on The Beautiful and
Damned, and then to New York. Flappers and Philosophers, Fitzgerald’s first collection of short stories, is published. Following the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment , women gain the right to vote.

  1921 Scott and Zelda spend months traveling in England, France, and Italy. They return in August to Minnesota, where Zelda gives birth to a daughter, Frances Scott (“Scottie”).

  1922 The Beautiful and Damned, about the dissipated life of an artist and his wife, is published. Another collection of short stories, Tales of the Jazz Age, is published in September. The family moves to Great Neck, Long Island (New York). Fitzgerald’s drinking habit grows. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses are published.

  1923 The Vegetable, a play the Fitzgeralds thought would make them wealthy, is published but not produced. Jazz musician Duke Ellington first plays in New York.

  1924 The family moves to the French Riviera, where Zelda has an affair with Edouard Jozan, a French pilot. Fitzgerald drafts his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby. The Fitzgeralds befriend wealthy American expatriates Gerald and Sara Murphy. The Fitzgeralds spend several months in Rome.

  1925 The Great Gatsby is published. Fitzgerald moves his family to Paris, where he meets Ernest Hemingway. Gangster Al Capone rises to the top of organized crime in Chicago.

  1926 Fitzgerald publishes All the Sad Young Men, a collection of stories that includes one of his best, “The Rich Boy,” which examines how wealth influences character. The family spends most of the year in the Riviera, returning to America