This Side Of Paradise [Paperback]

This Side of Paradise,F. Scott Fitzgerald's romantic and witty first novel, was written when the author was only twenty-three years old. This semiautobiographical story of the handsome, indulged, and idealistic Princeton student Amory Blaine received critical raves and catapulted Fitzgerald to instant fame. Now, readers can enjoy the newly edited, authorized version of this early classic of the Jazz Age, based on Fitzgerald's original manuscript. In this definitive text,This Side of Paradisecaptures the rhythms and romance of Fitzgerald's youth and offers a poignant portrait of the Lost Generation. CHAPTER I
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 of drowsing over the Encyclopædia Britannica, grew wealthy at thirty through the deaths 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! Therewasa 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 glorylă0