Recommendations
Books Like This Side of Paradise
Best books to read after This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise is Fitzgerald's debut — exuberant, literary, autobiographical, and the novel that announced the Jazz Age. If Amory Blaine's romantic idealism and his gradual disillusionment with the world moved you, these books share Fitzgerald's concern with the gap between aspiration and reality and his ability to make the pursuit of the American Dream feel simultaneously beautiful and doomed.
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The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The perfection that This Side of Paradise pointed toward — Fitzgerald's prose at its most controlled and the themes of wealth, illusion, and the American Dream given their most precise formal expression; the essential next Fitzgerald after the debut, showing how quickly he found what he was looking for
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The Beautiful and Damned
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald's second novel and the step between This Side of Paradise and Gatsby — Anthony and Gloria Patch waiting for an inheritance while their lives disintegrate; the darkening of the themes that This Side of Paradise introduces with more romantic illusion
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Tender Is the Night
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The culmination of everything This Side of Paradise begins — Dick Diver's disintegration in Europe; the most psychologically complex Fitzgerald and the work that returns to the autobiographical rawness of the debut from the perspective of a man who has lived through what Amory Blaine was too young to understand
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Brideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh
Waugh's novel about a young Oxford man drawn into the world of a beautiful and doomed aristocratic family — the British parallel to This Side of Paradise; both novels are about a young man of exceptional intelligence and romantic susceptibility encountering a world of beauty and privilege that simultaneously attracts and corrupts him
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The Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Ishiguro's Booker Prize-winning novel about an English butler who reflects on a life spent in service at the expense of his own emotional life — a contemporary meditation on the same question that runs through This Side of Paradise: what does a person sacrifice when they subordinate their inner life to an ideal (of service, of glamour, of the American Dream) that turns out to be hollow?
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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
by James Joyce
Joyce's autobiographical Bildungsroman — the development of the artist Stephen Dedalus from Catholic childhood to artistic self-declaration — is the Irish modernist parallel to This Side of Paradise; both are bildungsromane organized around the development of a young man's aesthetic and moral sensibility, and both end at the threshold of artistic independence rather than achieved success
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Of Human Bondage
by W. Somerset Maugham
Maugham's autobiographical novel about Philip Carey's long, painful education through a series of romantic and professional failures — the most direct British contemporary parallel to This Side of Paradise in its portrait of a sensitive young man who believes in his own exceptional nature and is educated by experience in the limits of that belief
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Look Homeward, Angel
by Thomas Wolfe
Wolfe's autobiographical novel about Eugene Gant's Southern childhood and adolescence — published nine years after This Side of Paradise and directly influenced by it; sharing Fitzgerald's romantic grandeur, his self-mythologizing, and his portrait of a young man who feels his life contains a significance the world hasn't yet recognized
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