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Zusatztext “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 Informationen zum Autor Susan Orlean is the author of The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup, The Orchid Thief, and Saturday Night . She has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992. She lives in New York City. Klappentext This Side of Paradise is the book that established F. Scott Fitzgerald as the prophet and golden boy of the newly dawned Jazz Age. Published in 1920! when he was just twenty-three! the novel catapulted him to instant fame and financial success. The story of Amory Blaine! a privileged! aimless! and self-absorbed Princeton student! This Side of Paradise closely reflects Fitzgerald's own experiences as an undergraduate. Amory Blaine's journey from prep school to college to the First World War is an account of "the lost generation." The young "romantic egotist" symbolizes what Fitzgerald so memorably described as "a new generation grown up to find all Gods dead! all wars fought! all faiths in man shaken." A pastiche of literary styles! this dazzling chronicle of youth remains bitingly relevant decades later. "This Side of Paradise commits almost every sin that a novel can possibly commit!" wrote Edmund Wilson. "But it does not commit the unpardonable sin: it does not fail to live. The whole preposterous farrago is animated with life." 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, barren of all ideas, in t...
