Reading Order
This Side of ParadiseF. Scott Fitzgerald Novels Reading Order Reading Order
F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise (1920) was his debut novel — published when he was twenty-three, it announced the Jazz Age and made Fitzgerald famous overnight. The story of Amory Blaine's Princeton years, his failed romances, and his gradual disillusionment with the American Dream is simultaneously autobiographical, literary, and the defining portrait of a generation's collision with the post-World War I world. It is best read as the beginning of Fitzgerald's development rather than the end of it.
Where to start
This Side of Paradise
Complete This Side of Paradise Book List
- 1Buy
This Side of Paradise
F. Scott Fitzgerald·1920·Start here — Fitzgerald's debut and the novel that announced the Jazz Age; exuberant, literary, and uneven, it is the essential context for understanding how The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night developed from a single autobiographical impulse. - 2Buy
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald·1925·The perfection that This Side of Paradise pointed toward — Fitzgerald's prose at its most controlled, the themes of wealth, illusion, and the American Dream given their most precise formal expression; the essential next Fitzgerald after the debut. - 3Buy
The Beautiful and Damned
F. Scott Fitzgerald·1922·Fitzgerald's second novel — Anthony and Gloria Patch, who spend a decade waiting for an inheritance while their lives and marriage disintegrate; the step between This Side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby in his development, and the work that most directly shows his themes darkening. - 4Buy
Tender Is the Night
F. Scott Fitzgerald·1934·Fitzgerald's most ambitious novel — Dick Diver's disintegration in Europe; the culmination of everything This Side of Paradise begins, returning 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. - 5Buy
A Moveable Feast
Ernest Hemingway·1964·Hemingway's memoir of Paris in the 1920s contains essential chapters about Fitzgerald — their friendship, Fitzgerald's drinking, and the writing of The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night; the essential non-fiction context for understanding the world and the relationships that shaped all of Fitzgerald's mature fiction.
This Side of Paradise — Frequently Asked Questions
Is This Side of Paradise a good first Fitzgerald novel?
It's the natural starting point for readers who want to follow Fitzgerald's development chronologically, but it's not his best novel. This Side of Paradise is exuberant and literary but also uneven and self-consciously bookish in ways that The Great Gatsby is not. Readers who want the best Fitzgerald should start with The Great Gatsby; readers who want to understand where Fitzgerald came from and how quickly he developed should start with This Side of Paradise and read the four novels in order.
How autobiographical is This Side of Paradise?
Very — Amory Blaine is Fitzgerald thinly disguised, and the novel draws directly on his Princeton years, his failed romance with Ginevra King (the model for Isabelle and later for Daisy Buchanan), his military service, and his early New York years. The novel's literary references and enthusiasms are Fitzgerald's own, and the emotional arc — a young man who believes in his own exceptional nature and discovers that the world does not share his opinion — mirrors Fitzgerald's own early career trajectory. He was writing about himself, and he knew it.
What does "This Side of Paradise" mean?
The title comes from a Rupert Brooke poem: 'Well this side of Paradise! / There's little comfort in the wise.' It suggests the post-war generation's sense of being permanently on the wrong side of an experience of transcendence or perfect happiness that they glimpsed and lost; the phrase captures the combination of romantic aspiration and disillusionment that defines Amory Blaine throughout the novel. Fitzgerald chose it to signal that his generation's experience was defined by what it had lost, not what it had found.
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