March 26, 1920—This Side of Paradise, the first novel of 23-year-old F. Scott Fitzgerald, was published by Scribners, garnering strong sales and acclaim for the author as the voice of a generation.
As a more world-weary Fitzgerald xplained in his 1937 essay “Early Success” (posthumously collected in The Crack-Up), his publisher had chuckled at the rookie author's expectation that the book’s sales would not exceed 20,000. Five thousand, he was quickly set straight, would be great for a first-time novelist. “I think it was a week after publication that it passed the twenty thousand mark,” Fitzgerald observed drily.
Let’s stipulate this up front: This Side of Paradise is not The Great Gatsby. But every author has to start somewhere (Shakespeare, after all, had Titus Andronicus), and the novel did give Fitzgerald a perspective that he never really lost, despite the epic battle with alcohol he was about to wage: that of a disciplined, professional author.
Even on its own merits, This Side of Paradise doesn’t lack for distinction. It would take hard experience and an obsession with aesthetics that began to take hold (though still fitfully) with the creation of The Beautiful and Damned, but even at this point Fitzgerald was demonstrating that he was incapable of writing a bad sentence.
As a more world-weary Fitzgerald xplained in his 1937 essay “Early Success” (posthumously collected in The Crack-Up), his publisher had chuckled at the rookie author's expectation that the book’s sales would not exceed 20,000. Five thousand, he was quickly set straight, would be great for a first-time novelist. “I think it was a week after publication that it passed the twenty thousand mark,” Fitzgerald observed drily.
Let’s stipulate this up front: This Side of Paradise is not The Great Gatsby. But every author has to start somewhere (Shakespeare, after all, had Titus Andronicus), and the novel did give Fitzgerald a perspective that he never really lost, despite the epic battle with alcohol he was about to wage: that of a disciplined, professional author.
Even on its own merits, This Side of Paradise doesn’t lack for distinction. It would take hard experience and an obsession with aesthetics that began to take hold (though still fitfully) with the creation of The Beautiful and Damned, but even at this point Fitzgerald was demonstrating that he was incapable of writing a bad sentence.
In this novel and his two subsequent short-story collections, Flappers and Philosophers and Tales of the Jazz Age, he was already showing, according to the late novelist-critic Thomas Flanagan, an “uncanny ability to evoke atmosphere, moods, energies, through his deployment of sounds, colors, lights, shadows.”
From a cultural perspective, the novel might have been significant in another way: I can’t think of an earlier American work of fiction that became famous precisely for its picture of the younger generation. Before this, the public had not cared particularly how youth thought or behaved. After the Great Crash, it would take another two decades—until, I’d say, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye—before serious attention began to be paid to young people again.
Why the attention in the Twenties? The youth who came of age after World War I were different. The automobile gave them unprecedented freedom from their elders, including in sexual matters. Furthering their radical estrangement from traditional mores, the war disabused them of all notions of military glory, and Prohibition was creating a nation of lawbreakers.
Fitzgerald’s alienation took an additional form: the collapse of his Roman Catholic faith. The 1919 death of spiritual mentor and surrogate father Fr. Sigourney Fay, an Episcopal convert who had, for a time, heavily influenced the novelist, severed his last connection with the faith of his ancestors.
(Incidentally, Fr. Fay—who inspired the novel’s worldly Monsignor Darcy—also led a young, tall actress to choose a first name that would mark her as distinctive. We know Susan Weaver these days better as Sigourney Weaver.)
Any notion of becoming the voice of “The Jazz Age” was way beyond Fitzgerald (who, it should be noted, like future frenemy Ernest Hemingway, actually preferred classical music) as he wrote furiously in the summer of 1919 in his hometown of St. Paul, Minn. He was just a young guy who wanted to write—and to win the hand of a young Southern beauty he had fallen in love with but was in danger of losing because he didn’t have enough money.
A half-dozen years ago, I toured St. Paul, soaking in the atmosphere in which Fitzgerald grew up. In his childhood, the financial travails of Fitzgerald’s parents, Edward and Mollie Fitzgerald, took them to several residences. These homes remain privately owned, and the city does not have a Fitzgerald museum. (One residence, however—the apartment building at 599 Summit Avenue where Fitzgerald wrote This Side of Paradise—made the National Register of Historic Places.)
Even without a museum, however, a half-day’s walk will take you through Fitzgerald’s childhood and early adult haunts around beautiful Summit Avenue and its network of side streets just below the Cathedral of St. Paul, in a neighborhood known as Ramsey Hill.
From a cultural perspective, the novel might have been significant in another way: I can’t think of an earlier American work of fiction that became famous precisely for its picture of the younger generation. Before this, the public had not cared particularly how youth thought or behaved. After the Great Crash, it would take another two decades—until, I’d say, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye—before serious attention began to be paid to young people again.
Why the attention in the Twenties? The youth who came of age after World War I were different. The automobile gave them unprecedented freedom from their elders, including in sexual matters. Furthering their radical estrangement from traditional mores, the war disabused them of all notions of military glory, and Prohibition was creating a nation of lawbreakers.
Fitzgerald’s alienation took an additional form: the collapse of his Roman Catholic faith. The 1919 death of spiritual mentor and surrogate father Fr. Sigourney Fay, an Episcopal convert who had, for a time, heavily influenced the novelist, severed his last connection with the faith of his ancestors.
(Incidentally, Fr. Fay—who inspired the novel’s worldly Monsignor Darcy—also led a young, tall actress to choose a first name that would mark her as distinctive. We know Susan Weaver these days better as Sigourney Weaver.)
Any notion of becoming the voice of “The Jazz Age” was way beyond Fitzgerald (who, it should be noted, like future frenemy Ernest Hemingway, actually preferred classical music) as he wrote furiously in the summer of 1919 in his hometown of St. Paul, Minn. He was just a young guy who wanted to write—and to win the hand of a young Southern beauty he had fallen in love with but was in danger of losing because he didn’t have enough money.
A half-dozen years ago, I toured St. Paul, soaking in the atmosphere in which Fitzgerald grew up. In his childhood, the financial travails of Fitzgerald’s parents, Edward and Mollie Fitzgerald, took them to several residences. These homes remain privately owned, and the city does not have a Fitzgerald museum. (One residence, however—the apartment building at 599 Summit Avenue where Fitzgerald wrote This Side of Paradise—made the National Register of Historic Places.)
Even without a museum, however, a half-day’s walk will take you through Fitzgerald’s childhood and early adult haunts around beautiful Summit Avenue and its network of side streets just below the Cathedral of St. Paul, in a neighborhood known as Ramsey Hill.
The gracious homes on this sweeping boulevard and its environs--one of the best-preserved Victorian neighborhoods in America--still attract St. Paul’s most famous citizens, including Garrison Keillor, who broadcasts his radio show A Prairie Home Companion out of a restored theater renamed in the novelist’s honor.
It is estimated that there were more than 100 structures in St. Paul associated with Fitzgerald, mostly in a 12-square-block area. Remarkably, approximately 80 still exist.
While Scott attended Princeton, Edward and Mollie relocated to 593 Summit Avenue, part of a brick rowhouse built in the Richardsonian Romanesque style. Four years later, in 1918, they moved again, to the 599 unit on Summit.
Here Scott repaired in July 1919, at the end of a series of failures or anti-climaxes: dropping out of Princeton because of poor grades; an Army stint in WWI in which he never saw combat or even went overseas; a New York advertising job that he loathed; rejection by Scribners of his first attempt at a novel, The Romantic Egotist; the breakup of his engagement to southern belle Zelda Sayre, because she feared he couldn’t support her; and a week-long bender over this romantic failure. “I was in love with a whirlwind,” he later wrote, “so when the girl threw me over, I went home and finished my novel.”
Scribners editor Maxwell Perkins, though rejecting The Romantic Egotist, had given Fitzgerald hope that it could be salvaged. In his parents’ “house below the average on a street above the average,” Fitzgerald, looking to stake his claim as a writer, worked tirelessly for the next three months.
When particularly consumed by his work, he’d use a speaking tube outside his room and order meals to be brought up. Onlookers gazing up at Fitzgerald’s guest room on the third floor would have seen the shadows of paper pinned to his curtains and walls – evidence of heavy revisions to his work.
And then…Success.
After he received Maxwell Perkins’ letter accepting This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald ran up and down the street, stopping cars to tell everyone. “That week the postman rang and rang,” Fitzgerald wrote, “and I paid off my terrible small debts, bought a suit, and woke up every morning into a world of ineffable topflightiness and promise.”
Success brought him Zelda. Within two weeks after publication of This Side of Paradise, the two were married in the rectory of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.
And then…Success.
After he received Maxwell Perkins’ letter accepting This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald ran up and down the street, stopping cars to tell everyone. “That week the postman rang and rang,” Fitzgerald wrote, “and I paid off my terrible small debts, bought a suit, and woke up every morning into a world of ineffable topflightiness and promise.”
Success brought him Zelda. Within two weeks after publication of This Side of Paradise, the two were married in the rectory of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.
Ahead of them lay a celebrity so luminous that a Hollywood producer suggested that they should play their fictional counterparts from This Side of Paradise, Amory Blaine and Rosalind Connage, in a film version that never came to be. Also ahead, of course, were a nomadic existence, marked by a double tragedy that neither headstrong, lovestruck youth could anticipate.
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