This Side of Paradise
- 244
- Pages
- about 4.5 h
- Reading time
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Our view
“This Side of Paradise” captures carefree young Americans on the eve of the Jazz Age with a debut novelist’s restlessness. Fitzgerald follows Amory Blaine, a Princeton student, through a taste for literature and a string of unsatisfying romances. Some readers find it plainly a first novel, with a hero hard to like, and rank it below “The Great Gatsby”, though its philosophical closing pages find favour. Worth reading to see how Fitzgerald began.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
This Side of Paradise is the 1920 debut novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. It examines the lives and morality of carefree American youth at the dawn of the Jazz Age. Its protagonist, Amory Blaine, is a handsome middle-class student at Princeton University who dabbles in literature and engages in a series of unfulfilling romances with young women. The novel explores themes of love warped by greed and social ambition. Fitzgerald, who took inspiration for the title from a line in Rupert Brooke's poem Tiare Tahiti, spent years revising the novel before Charles Scribner's Sons accepted it for publication.
Where the score comes from
The sources average 7.2 across 126 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 46% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Classics average of 7.7. That is how 7.5 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 7.7 | 18 | 14% |
| Hardcover | 7.1 | 108 | 86% |
Frequently asked
How long is This Side of Paradise?
It has 244 pages — shorter than 57% of the ranked books in Classics.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
The same shelf — Classics — and a score of 7.5, the closest to this book.
