Five-minute digest
This Side of Paradise
Summary
Amory Blaine, the only son of the wealthy, eccentric Beatrice Blaine and her ineffectual husband Stephen, is raised in luxury, travels with his mother, and grows up handsome, clever and sure of his own superiority. After two years in Minneapolis and a spell at a New England boarding school, where he is unpopular and then a football hero, he goes to Princeton, drawn by its glamour. Through his mother he knows Monsignor Thayer Darcy, a worldly, warm-hearted Catholic priest who becomes his confidant and spiritual father, writing him letters that treat him as a kindred Celtic soul. At Princeton Amory works for the clubs, the Triangle Club show and the Princetonian, flirts by letter and in person with the debutante Isabelle Borgé, and is shaken when his friend Dick Humbird is killed in a car accident after a night out. He fails a make-up examination and loses his place on the paper. In New York, after a night with chorus girls, he believes he sees the devil, a vision that sends him into a period of moral fastidiousness. His father dies and the family fortune shrinks. His friend Burne Holiday renounces the clubs, reads Tolstoy and becomes a pacifist, and Amory falls briefly in love with his widowed cousin Clara Page, who refuses him. A short interlude of letters and a poem carries him through the war years, during which he serves in France; friends die, his mother dies, and much of her money is gone. Back in New York in 1919 he falls deeply in love with Rosalind Connage, the brilliant younger sister of his classmate Alec. Their courtship is written as a play. Amory works in an advertising agency, but Rosalind will not marry a poor man, and she leaves him for the reliable Dawson Ryder. Amory goes on a three-week drinking spree that Prohibition ends. In Maryland he has a brief, strange romance with the wild Eleanor Savage. At Atlantic City he takes the blame when house detectives find Alec with a young woman in a hotel room, protecting his friend at the cost of his own name. He learns that Rosalind is to marry and that Monsignor Darcy has died. Walking alone toward Princeton, he gets a ride from the father of his dead classmate Jesse Ferrenby, argues for socialism, and ends at the college gates, crying out that he knows himself but that is all. Charles Scribner's Sons published the novel on 26 March 1920, after rejecting an earlier version titled The Romantic Egotist in 1918; it made Fitzgerald famous at twenty-three. It is dedicated to Sigourney Fay, the priest behind Monsignor Darcy.
Top Lessons
Personality and personage
Monsignor Darcy tells Amory that a personality depends on charm and fades, while a personage gathers achievements and character over time. The book traces Amory's slow, unfinished turn from the first toward the second.
Love and money
Rosalind loves Amory but will not marry a poor man, and she says so plainly. Fitzgerald presents her choice in her own terms, as fear of a shabby, quarrelsome life, and leaves the reader to weigh it.
Faith remembered
Amory is not a practising Catholic, yet Darcy's Catholicism is the only code he half keeps, and he flees in terror from what he takes to be evil. The novel records a young man drifting from faith while still haunted by it.
A generation's restlessness
The closing chapter describes a new generation grown up to find all Gods dead and faith shaken. Fitzgerald speaks for young people after the Great War who felt cut off from older certainties.
Verified Quotes
Frequently cited
“Amory Blaine inherited from his mother every trait, except the stray inexpressible few, that made him worth while.”
“After the operation Beatrice had a nervous breakdown that bore a suspicious resemblance to delirium tremens”
“I’m a cynical idealist.”
Frequently cited
“Now a personage, on the other hand, gathers. He is never thought of apart from what he’s done.”
“The education of all beautiful women is the knowledge of men.”
“The advent of prohibition with the “thirsty-first” put a sudden stop to the submerging of Amory’s sorrows”
Frequently cited
“a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken”
Frequently cited
““I know myself,” he cried, “but that is all.””
Medical Lens
Drink runs through the book: Beatrice's 'nervous breakdown' is said to resemble delirium tremens, and after losing Rosalind Amory drinks steadily for three weeks until national Prohibition ends the spree. In New York Amory, after a night of drinking and excitement, sees a figure he takes for the devil and then the face of his dead friend Dick Humbird, an experience the novel presents as moral and supernatural rather than as intoxication, though readers may read it either way. Dick Humbird's death in a car crash and the deaths of classmates in the war give Amory his first encounters with mortality. Amory's restlessness and despair after Rosalind are written as moods rather than illness; any diagnosis is interpretive.
- Book One, Ch. 1
Amory's appendix bursts on an ocean liner, the ship turns back, and after the operation Beatrice suffers a 'nervous breakdown' the narrator likens to delirium tremens; Amory is sent to Minneapolis.
- Book One, Ch. 2
The car crash on the road from New York in which Dick Humbird is killed.
- Book One, Ch. 3 ('The Devil')
Amory's vision of a ghostly figure in a New York apartment and his flight through the streets.
- Book Two, Ch. 2
Amory's three-week binge after Rosalind leaves him, ended by the coming of Prohibition.