This Side of Paradise

Book One
The Romantic Egotist
Amory, Son of Beatrice

Amory Blaine inherited from his mother every trait, except the stray inexpressible few, that made him worth while. His father, an ineffectual, inarticulate man with a taste for Byron and a habit for drowsing over the Encyclopædia Britannica, grew wealthy at thirty through the death of two elder brothers, successful Chicago brokers, and in the first flush of feeling that the world was his, went to Bar Harbor and met Beatrice O Hara. In consequence, Stephen Blaine handed down to posterity his height of just under six feet and his tendency to waver at crucial moments, these two abstractions appearing in his son Amory. For many years he hovered in the background of his family s life, an unassertive figure with a face half-obliterated by lifeless, silky hair continually occupied in taking care of his wife, continually harassed by the idea that he didn t and couldn t understand her.

But Beatrice Blaine! There was a woman! Early pictures taken on her father s estate at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, or in Rome at the Sacred Heart Convent an educational extravagance that in her youth was only for the daughters of the exceptionally wealthy showed the exquisite delicacy of her features, the consummate art and simplicity of her clothes. A brilliant education she had her youth passed in renaissance glory, she was versed in the latest gossip of the Older Roman Families; known by name as a fabulously wealthy American girl to Cardinal Vitori and Queen Margherita and more subtle celebrities that one must have had some culture even to have heard of. She learned in England to prefer whiskey and soda to wine, and her small talk was broadened in two senses during a winter in Vienna. All in all Beatrice O Hara absorbed the sort of education that will be quite impossible ever again; a tutelage measured by the number of things and people one could be contemptuous of and charming about; a culture rich in all arts and traditions,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

As nearly perfect as such a work could be . . . The glorious spirit of abounding youth glows throughout this fascinating tale. Amory, the romantic egotist, is essentially American. The New York Times

[A] bravura display of literary promise . . . Fitzgerald s prose is capable of soaring like a violin, and of moving his readers with understated husky notes as well as with notes of piercing purity . . . Fitzgerald knew that glamour was bound to fail, that there is an ineradicable human instinct for it which is utterly mistaken. from the Introduction by Craig Raine