Beatrice Blaine – an aging and eccentric matron who is Amory’s mother. Based on the mother of one of Fitzgerald’s friends.
Clara Page – a widowed older cousin for whom Amory has unrequited affection. Based on Fitzgerald’s cousin Cecilia Delihant Taylor.
Cecilia Connage – Rosalind’s cynical younger sister who steals cigarettes and envies her sibling’s popularity among young men.
Allenby – a heroic football captain at Princeton based on Hobey Baker. A renowned American football and ice hockey player, Baker garnered universal praise from the national press as one of the greatest athletes of his time, embodying everything Fitzgerald aspired to be as a Princeton undergraduate. Fitzgerald described Baker as «an ideal worthy of everything in my enthusiastic admiration, yet consummated and expressed in a human being who stood within ten feet of me.» After graduating from Princeton in 1914, Baker enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Service amid World War I and died in a plane crash in December 1918.
Thomas Parke D’Invilliers – a Princeton classmate who has a gift for poetry. Fitzgerald based D’Invilliers on his friend, poet John Peale Bishop. D’Invilliers becomes Amory’s close friend and confidante in various subjects, among which are literature, love for young beauties, politics, and the meaning of the self. He becomes a journalist, developing his own perspectives apart from those he shares with Amory. The character reappears as a fictitious poet quoted on the title page of Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby.
Background and composition
Love, war, and novel ambitions
Since childhood, F. Scott Fitzgerald aspired to become a famous novelist. «Three months before I was born,» Scott later wrote, «my mother lost her other two children… I think I started then to be a writer.» While attending Princeton University, his passion for writing literature began to solidify into a career choice, and he wrote fiction as an undergraduate for the Princeton Triangle Club, the Princeton Tiger, and the Nassau Literary Review.
During his sophomore year at Princeton, Fitzgerald returned home to Saint Paul, Minnesota during Christmas break where the 18-year-old aspiring writer met and fell in love with 16-year-old Chicago debutante Ginevra King. They began a passionate romantic relationship spanning several years. Although Ginevra loved him, her upper-class family belittled Scott’s courtship because of his lower-class status compared to her other wealthy suitors. Rejected by Ginevra as a suitable match, a suicidal Fitzgerald enlisted in the United States Army amid World War I.
In November 1917, hoping to have a novel published before his deployment to Europe and his anticipated death in the muddy trenches of World War I, Fitzgerald began writing a 120,000-word manuscript titled The Romantic Egotist. Having never before undertaken a novel, he relied upon H. G. Wells’ 1909 novel Tono-Bungay and Sir Compton Mackenzie’s 1913 novel Sinister Street as his literary templates. He sought to write «searchingly the story of the youth of our generation» and to put himself «in the middle as a sort of observer and conscious factor». After obtaining a brief leave from the army in February 1918, Fitzgerald continued work on his unpublished manuscript at the University Cottage Club’s library in Princeton. Eighty-one pages of this revised manuscript later appeared in the final version of This Side of Paradise.
In March 1918, Fitzgerald gave the revised manuscript to his acquaintance, Anglo-Irish journalist Shane Leslie, to deliver to Charles Scribner’s Sons in New York City. Fitzgerald had met Leslie when the journalist visited America and toured the Newman School in New Jersey. After proofreading The Romantic Egotist, Leslie asked Scribner’s to retain the manuscript no matter what they thought of it. He proclaimed that Fitzgerald, upon his presumed death in the trenches, would become the next Rupert Brooke, a posthumously famous poet killed during World War I. «Though Scott Fitzgerald is still alive it has a literary value,» Leslie wrote to Scribner’s on May 6, 1918, «Of course when he is killed, it will also have a commercial value.»
Upon reading Fitzgerald’s draft of The Romantic Egotist, Scribner’s editor Max Perkins urged his superiors to publish the manuscript, but senior editors Edward L. Burlingame and William C. Brownell disagreed with him regarding its quality and instructed him to reject the work. In an August 19, 1918 letter to Fitzgerald, Perkins turned down the manuscript but praised the writer’s talent. Although he had been instructed to reject the work, Perkins provided detailed guidance on how to revise it, suggesting that Fitzgerald add more significance and details about his «affairs with girls.» Perkins encouraged Fitzgerald to resubmit the manuscript after making these revisions.
By June 1918, Fitzgerald served with the 45th and 67th Infantry Regiments at Camp Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama. Attempting to rebound from Ginevra’s rejection, a lonely Fitzgerald began courting young women, including Zelda Sayre, an idle Southern belle, who reminded him of Ginevra. At their first meeting, Fitzgerald told Zelda that she reminded him of Isabelle, the free-spirited character based on Ginevra in his unpublished manuscript.
After sharing his ambitions, Zelda dismissed Fitzgerald’s remarks as mere boastfulness and concluded that he would never become a famous writer. A romance blossomed, although Fitzgerald continued secretly writing to Ginevra, hoping in vain for a chance to resume their relationship. Three days after Ginevra’s arranged marriage to a wealthy Chicago polo player, a heartbroken Fitzgerald professed his affection for Zelda in September 1918. In October 1918, Fitzgerald submitted a revised version of The Romantic Egoist to Scribner’s, but the publisher rejected the work a second time, and he captioned their telegram in his scrapbook: «The end of a dream.»
Despair and manuscript revisions
After his army discharge in February 1919, Fitzgerald moved to New York City amid the onset of the Jazz Age. While seeking a breakthrough as an author of fiction, he turned to writing advertising copy for Barron Collier to sustain himself but the vacuity of the work irritated him. «Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business,» Fitzgerald complained. «You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.» Although Fitzgerald had not intended to marry Zelda in December 1918, he changed his mind over the next three months, and the two became engaged by March 1919. As time passed, Fitzgerald continued living in poverty in New York City, and he could not convince Zelda that he could support her affluent lifestyle. She broke off their engagement in June.
In the wake of Fitzgerald’s rejection by Ginevra two years prior, his subsequent rejection by Zelda further dispirited him. Unable to earn a successful living, Fitzgerald carried a revolver daily while contemplating suicide, and he threatened to jump to his death from a window ledge of the Yale Club. According to biographer Andrew Turnbull, «one day, drinking martinis in the upstairs lounge, Fitzgerald announced that he was going to jump out of the window. No one objected; on the contrary, it was pointed out that the windows were French and ideally suited for jumping, which seemed to cool his ardor.» Despite Zelda’s rejection, Fitzgerald hoped that his success as an author might change her mind. He told a friend, «I wouldn’t care if she died, but I couldn’t stand to have anybody else marry her.»
In July 1919, Fitzgerald quit his advertising job and returned to St. Paul. Returning to his hometown as a failure, Fitzgerald became a recluse and lived on the top floor of his parents’ home at 599 Summit Avenue. He decided to make one last attempt to become a novelist and to stake everything on the success or failure of a book. Abstaining from alcohol, he worked day and night to revise The Romantic Egotist as This Side of Paradise—an autobiographical account of his Princeton years and his romances with Ginevra King, Zelda Sayre, and other young women. Fitzgerald chose the new title based on a line in Rupert Brooke’s poem Tiare Tahiti, «Well this side of Paradise!… There’s little comfort in the wise.»
While revising the manuscript, Fitzgerald drew upon the correspondence of friends and acquaintances. He quoted verbatim three letters and one poem by Father Sigourney Fay, a possibly gay Catholic priest with whom Fitzgerald had a close relationship. He also used a quote from Zelda’s letters for a soliloquy by the narrator in the final pages. Zelda had written a letter eulogizing the Confederate soldiers who died during the American Civil War. «I’ve spent today in the graveyard,» she wrote to Scott, «Isn’t it funny how, out of a row of Confederate soldiers, two or three will make you think of dead lovers and dead loves—when they’re exactly like the others, even to the yellowish moss.» In the novel’s final pages, Fitzgerald altered Zelda’s neo-Confederate sentiments to refer to Union soldiers instead of Confederates.
Fitzgerald sent the revised manuscript to Scribner’s on September 4, 1919. Although the manuscript again impressed editor Max Perkins who wished to publish the novel, senior executives at the publishing house again disagreed with Perkins and disliked the novel on the grounds of indecency. At the monthly meeting of Scribner’s editorial board, an elderly Charles Scribner II, the president of the company, grumbled that Fitzgerald’s work lacked «literary merit,» and senior editor William C. Brownell dismissed it as «frivolous.»
As the lone voice supporting the publication of Fitzgerald’s novel at the editorial board meeting, a frustrated Perkins threatened to resign unless
