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THIS SIDE OF PARADISE
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896–1940) was born in
St Paul, Minnesota, and named after his second cousin three times
removed, the author of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. He went to
Princeton University, but dropped out, eventually joining the Army
in1917. While in the service he began writing a novel, and also met
and fell in love with Zelda Sayre, of Montgomery, Alabama, whom
he married in the spring of 1920, the year in which he published his
first novel, This Side of Paradise. The novel, a thinly disguised
fictional account of Fitzgerald’s Princeton years, made its author an
instant literary success, and a celebrity as well. Dividing his time
between the East Coast of the United States and France during the
1920s, Fitzgerald wrote short stories in order to earn enough money
to sustain himself and his family between novels. His second novel,
The Beautiful and Damned (1922), was not nearly as critically suc-
cessful as his first. It was followed by a brief but disastrous excursion
into drama, The Vegetable (1923), and by his acknowledged master-
piece, The Great Gatsby (1925), which marked a departure
for Fitzgerald in its poetic style, its narrative complexity, and its
highly controlled concise structure. Beset during the late 1920s
and early 1930s by his wife’s psychiatric difficulties, which required
periodic hospitalization, and by his own financial problems, he
did not produce another novel until 1934, when Tender Is the Night
appeared — to mixed reviews and disappointing sales. In 1937
Fitzgerald went to Hollywood to write film scripts; despite working
on numerous movies, he received screen credit for only one, but he
paid off most of his debts and began a novel about the movie
industry. The Last Tycoon was nearly half-completed in first draft
form when, on 21 December 1940, Fitzgerald died of a heart attack.
Jackson R. Bryer is Professor Emeritus at the University of
Maryland. He has published widely on F. Scott Fitzgerald, includ-
ing an edition of the love letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald,
Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda (2002), and he has been President of the
F. Scott Fitzgerald Society since 1990. His most recent book is
The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder (2008).
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
This Side of Paradise
Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
JACKSON R. BRYER
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fitzgerald, F. Scott (Francis Scott), 1896-1940.
This Side of Paradise / F. Scott Fitzgerald;
edited, with an introduction and notes by Jackson R. Bryer.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978 – 0 – 19 – 954621 – 3 (pbk.)
1. World War, 1914–1918—Veterans—Fiction. 2. Children of the rich—Fiction.
3. College students—Fiction. 4. Advertising—Fiction. 5. Young men—Fiction.
I. Bryer, Jackson R. II. Title.
PS3511.I9T48 2009
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2009029696
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Printed in Great Britain
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ISBN 978 – 0 – 19 – 954621–3
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
CONTENTS
Introduction vii
Note on the Text xxvii
Select Bibliography xxix
A Chronology of F. Scott Fitzgerald xxxv
THIS SIDE OF PARADISE 1
Explanatory Notes 241
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INTRODUCTION
Sometime in the fall of 1917, in Princeton, New Jersey, awaiting his
commission as an Army officer,21-year-old F. Scott Fitzgerald began
work on his first novel.1 He had completed a lacklustre academic career
at Princeton University the previous spring, deciding not to return to
finish his degree, instead enlisting in the Army after the United States
entered the First World War in April. While he waited for his military
assignment, Fitzgerald attended lectures and helped his college room-
mate John Biggs Jr. edit the school’s literary magazine.
Although he had not previously written a novel, Fitzgerald was
hardly a novice author. From the age of 13, when he published his
first story, ‘The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage’, in The St. Paul
Academy Now and Then, through his high school years at the Newman
School in Hackensack, New Jersey, in whose Newman News he pub-
lished fiction, poetry, and journalism, to his years at Princeton,
where he contributed fiction, drama, and poetry to the Nassau
Literary Magazine, humorous verse and articles to The Princeton
Tiger, news articles and book reviews to The Daily Princetonian, and
wrote the lyrics for three Triangle Club musicals, he had had an
active and successful — albeit non-professional — writing career. He
was soon to discover, however, that writing in an extended form for
commercial purposes was a much more difficult task.
Fitzgerald had originally planned that his first book-length work
would be a volume of poetry, inspired by his literary heroes Rupert
Brooke and Algernon Swinburne (he was to quote from their work
often in This Side of Paradise); but eventually he decided instead on
a novel that would mingle verse and prose. Soon after he began writ-
ing, he was deployed to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, for basic training
and there he continued to work on his novel under less than ideal
conditions. As he recalled three years later:
Every evening, concealing my pad behind Small Problems for Infantry,
I wrote paragraph after paragraph on a somewhat edited history of me and
1 James L. W. West III, in The Making of This Side of Paradise (Philadelphia, 1983),
5–6, suggests that Fitzgerald began the novel in October while in Princeton. Matthew J.
Bruccoli, in Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald,2nd rev. edn.
(Columbia, SC, 2002),80, contends that he did not begin writing it until he got to train-
ing camp at Fort Leavenworth.
viii Introduction
my imagination. The outline of twenty-two chapters, four of them in
verse, was made, two chapters were completed; and then I was detected
and the game was up. I could write no more during study period.
There was a distinct complication. I had only three months to live — in
those days all infantry officers thought they had only three months to
live — and I had left no mark on the world. But such consuming ambition
was not to be thwarted by a mere war. Every Saturday at one o’clock
when the week’s work was over I hurried to the Officers’ Club, and there,
in a corner of a roomful of smoke, conversation and rattling newspapers,
I wrote a one-hundred-and-twenty-thousand-word novel on the consecu-
tive week-ends of three months. There was no revising; there was no time
for it.2
In early January 1918, after he had completed eighteen chapters out
of a planned twenty-three and titled the book ‘The Romantic
Egotist’, he described it to his college friend Edmund Wilson as
‘a prose, modernistic Child Harolde’, which
purports to be the picaresque ramble of one Stephen Palms from the San
Franciscofire, thru School, Princeton to the end where at twenty one he
writes his autobiography at the Princeton aviation school. It shows traces
of Tarkington, Chesterton, Chambers Wells, Benson (Robert Hugh),
Rupert Brooke and includes Compton McKenzie-like love-affairs and
three psychic adventures including an encounter with the devil in a harlots
apartment.3
By the time Fitzgerald completed his training in Kansas and
moved on to Camp Zachary Taylor, near Louisville, Kentucky, in
March 1918, he had finished the book and given it to Anglo-Irish
writer Shane Leslie, whom he had met in 1912 through Monsignor
Sigourney Fay, a teacher at the Newman School who became
Fitzgerald’s mentor and to whom he ultimately dedicated his first
novel, to send to the venerable and prestigious Charles Scribner’s
Sons. Scribner’s was not only Leslie’s publisher but also that of such
literary lions of the day as Edith Wharton, Henry James, John
Galsworthy, and J. M. Barrie. Leslie sent Fitzgerald’s manuscript to
Scribner’s in May, admitting in his covering letter that ‘I marvel at
it’s [sic] crudity and its cleverness. It is naive in places, shocking in
2 ‘Who’s Who and Why’, Saturday Evening Post, 18 September 1920; repr. in
Afternoon of an Author: A Selection of Uncollected Stories and Essays by F. Scott Fitzgerald
(New York, 1958),84–5.
3 Matthew J. Bruccoli (ed.), with the assistance of Judith S. Baughman, F. Scott
Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters (New York, 1994),17. Punctuation is Fitzgerald’s.
Introduction ix
others, painful to the conventional and not without a trace of ironic
sublimity especially toward the end,’ but he added, ‘It interests me
as a boy’s book and I think gives expression to that real American
youth that the sentimentalists and super patriots are so anxious to
drape behind the canvas of the Y.M.C.A. tent.’ Although its author
was ‘still alive it has a literary value. Of course when he is killed it
will also have a commercial value.’4
The prospect of Fitzgerald’s imminent demise did not convince
Scribner’s. As a very conservative firm, it is surprising that they
actually seemed to be divided whether or not to accept this manu-
script with its candid descriptions of youthful indiscretions. A junior
editor, Maxwell Perkins, was apparently in favour of publishing it;
but after considerable delay, in August 1918, Scribner’s sent the
author a remarkably encouraging letter of rejection, inviting him to
revise and resubmit. After referencing wartime strictures that increased
their costs and limited the number of books they could publish,
they suggested two specific areas of revision: ‘the story does not seem
to us to work up to a conclusion; — neither the hero’s career nor his
character are shown to be brought to any stage which justifies an
ending’ and ‘not enough significance is given to some of those salient
incidents and scenes, such as the affairs with girls. . . . it would be
well if the high points were heightened so far as justifiable.’5 In less
than a month, Fitzgerald made revisions and sent the manuscript
back to Scribner’s, but it was rejected again, this time within a
month.
Unlike the first one, this second rejection does not seem to have
encouraged Fitzgerald to do further work on the novel and resubmit
it; but even if it had, he probably would not have done so as rapidly
as he had previously because his life was now undergoing major
changes that must have preoccupied him. In July 1918, while he was
stationed at Camp Sheridan, outside Montgomery, Alabama, he had
met and fallen in love with Zelda Sayre, a popular and flirtatious
member of a locally prominent family. Throughout that summer and
fall, they engaged in an emotionally charged courtship, conducted
primarily in letters after Fitzgerald was transferred to Camp Mills,
on Long Island, to await overseas assignment. Much to Fitzgerald’s
disappointment, Armistice was declared before he could embark.
4 West, The Making of This Side of Paradise, 14.
5 Matthew J. Bruccoli and Margaret M. Duggan (eds.), with the assistance of Susan
Walker,Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York, 1980),31.
