Mencken declared the first half of This Side of Paradise to be superior to the second half, perceiving that Fitzgerald’s novel became more «thin» as the young author followed less autobiographical, more imaginary plot strands. (Fitzgerald seemingly agreed with Mencken’s low opinion of the later chapters, particularly Amory’s relations with Eleanor. In his annotated copy of This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald belatedly deemed his Eleanor subplot to be unintentionally hilarious and admitted he could not «even bear to read it.») Believing that Fitzgerald’s protagonist began to elude the author in the second half, Mencken criticized Fitzgerald for dropping «his Amory Blaine as Mark Twain dropped Huckleberry Finn, but for a less cogent reason.» Nevertheless, he praised the majority of the novel «down to and including the episode of the love affair with Rosalind».
Whereas some critics praised the novel’s form and structure as highly original, others criticized the work for the same reasons. Lillian C. Ford in The Los Angeles Times complained «the construction is odd and the book has two parts, the first with four chapters and the second with five. The chapters have unexpected topical divisions and when the author feels so inclined he throws his story into drama form and then again it jogs along as plain narrative.» Similarly, many reviewers commented that Fitzgerald’s structural craftsmanship left much to be desired. He could write entertainingly, they conceded, but he gave scant attention to form and construction. Having read these criticisms of his debut novel, Fitzgerald sought to improve on his form and construction in his next work, The Beautiful and Damned, and to venture into a new genre of fiction altogether.
Princeton backlash
Despite the novel’s warm reception by critics and readers, many of Princeton University’s faculty and alumni reacted with open hostility towards Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise. They disapproved of his popular novel for creating an unfavorable impression of their beloved alma mater, depicting it as a snobbish milieu filled with hedonistic degenerates focused on idle pleasures. Although Fitzgerald’s mentor Christian Gauss, a Professor of French Literature at Princeton, lauded This Side of Paradise as «a work of art,» other faculty and alumni attacked the book in the pages of the Princeton Alumni Weekly and The Daily Princetonian, much to Fitzgerald’s surprise and dismay. In one harsh review, Ralph Kent, a senior editor of the Nassau Literary Review, disparaged the work as impugning Princeton’s reputation due to its superficial depiction of undergraduate life.
Fitzgerald’s novel soon attracted the displeasure of John Grier Hibben, the Presbyterian minister and educational reformer who succeeded Woodrow Wilson as the president of Princeton University from 1912–1932. In a private letter to Fitzgerald dated May 27, 1920, President Hibben expressed his profound disappointment with Fitzgerald’s depiction of the university and informed the young author that his novel had wounded him:
It is because I appreciate so much all that is in you of artistic skill and certain elemental power that I am taking the liberty of telling you very frankly that your characterization of Princeton has grieved me. I cannot bear to think that our young men are merely living for four years in a country club and spending their lives wholly in a spirit of calculation and snobbishness… From my undergraduate days I have always had a belief in Princeton and in what the place could do in the making of a strong vigorous manhood. It would be an overwhelming grief to me, in the midst of my work here and my love for Princeton’s young men, should I feel that we have nothing to offer but the outgrown symbols and shells of a past whose reality has long since disappeared.
In response to Hibben’s chastising letter, Fitzgerald wrote a respectful but uncompromising reply that denied any attempt to disparage Princeton and defended his novel’s depiction of the university. «I have no fault to find with Princeton that I can’t find with Oxford and Cambridge,» Fitzgerald explained. «I simply wrote out of my own impressions, wrote as honestly as I could a picture of its beauty. That the picture is cynical is the fault of my temperament…. I must admit however that This Side of Paradise does over accentuate the gaiety and country club atmosphere of Princeton. For the sake of the readers interest that part was much over-stressed, and of course the hero, not being average, reacted rather unhealthily I suppose to many perfectly normal phenomena. To that extent the book is inaccurate.»
As a result of this unexpected backlash by the faculty and alumni, Fitzgerald’s joy at becoming a famous novelist proved short-lived. Although undergraduates across the country touted the novel as a realistic portrayal of college life, Princeton alumni and former classmates continued to treat the author with contempt in social settings over the ensuing months. In one instance, Fitzgerald visited Princeton’s University Cottage Club and faced a room full of alumni and former classmates who condemned him for tarnishing their school’s reputation. After informing Fitzgerald that he had been suspended from the club, they «symbolically» ejected him from the building via a rear window. Exasperated by the contemptuousness and sanctimoniousness of Princeton’s faculty and alumni, a dispirited Fitzgerald did not return to visit his alma mater for many years, presumably until the outcry had lessened.
After a 44-year-old Fitzgerald died of a heart attack due to occlusive coronary arteriosclerosis in December 1940, many Princeton staff and alumni continued to privately and publicly belittle the author and his literary oeuvre. According to biographer Scott Donaldson, after Fitzgerald’s death, his widow Zelda Fitzgerald attempted to sell the entirety of her late husband’s papers to Princeton University for the modest sum of $3,750 (equivalent to $81,556 in 2023), but the Princeton librarian spurned the offer. The Princeton librarian explained that the university felt no obligation to pay such a sum for the papers of a mediocre author who had been fortunate enough to attend their prestigious institution.
One year later, literary critic Edmund Wilson, a close friend of the Fitzgeralds, attempted to use his considerable influence to persuade the university to publish a book honoring F. Scott Fitzgerald but proved unsuccessful. In 1956, when the Princeton University Library released a collection of Fitzgerald’s writings titled Afternoon of an Author, many alumni wrote letters of complaint arguing that Princeton should neither celebrate its connection to the author nor describe him as «most Princetonian.»
Critical analysis
Contemporary analysis
Innovative style
For his first novel, Fitzgerald used as his literary templates H. G. Wells’ 1909 realist work Tono-Bungay and Sir Compton Mackenzie’s 1913 novel Sinister Street, which chronicles a college student’s coming of age at Oxford University. The influence of these two particular novels upon This Side of Paradise proved apparent to perceptive readers such as Fitzgerald’s friend Edmund Wilson who, upon finishing the novel, described Fitzgerald’s work as «an exquisite burlesque of Compton Mackenzie with a pastiche of Wells thrown in at the end.»
Although Fitzgerald imitated these latter two novels, his debut work differed due to its experimental style. He discarded the traditional narrative of most novels and instead unspooled the plot in the form of intermingled textual fragments, letters, and poetry, even incorporating a stream-of-consciousness passage. This approach resulted from combining The Romantic Egotist, his earlier novel attempt, with various short stories and poems he had written but never published. This atonal blend of different fictive elements prompted cultural elites to fête the young author as a literary trailblazer whose work modernized a staid literature that had fallen «as far behind modern habits as behind modern history.»
Prose anomalies
More so than most contemporary writers of his era, Fitzgerald’s authorial voice evolved and matured over time, and each of his novels represented a discernible progression in literary quality. Although he was eventually regarded as possessing «the best narrative gift of the century,» this narrative gift was not perceived as evident in This Side of Paradise. Believing that prose had a basis in lyric verse, Fitzgerald crafted his sentences by ear and, consequently, This Side of Paradise contains numerous malapropisms and descriptive non sequiturs which annoyed readers and reviewers. Reflecting on these copious defects, critic Edmund Wilson remarked that Fitzgerald’s first novel exhibited nearly every possible fault and weakness a novel can possess.
Posthumous analysis
In more recent years, the underlying themes of narcissism and feminism in the novel have been examined in a variety of scholarly essays. Scholar Saori Tanaka’s argues that «Amory comes to know himself through Beatrice and his four lovers, which are like five sheets of glass. They are his reflectors… reflecting his narcissism and the inner side.»
The first three women in the book allow Amory to dream in a narcissistic way. After participating in the war and losing his financial foundation, the last two women he meets, Rosalind and Eleanor, «make him not dream but awake» in postwar America. «With Beatrice and Isabelle, Amory activates the grandiose self,» Tanaka states, «with Clara and Rosalind, he restricts narcissism, and with Eleanor, he gains a realistic conception of the self.»
Others have analyzed feminist themes in the work. Scholar Andrew Riccardo views several characters to be feminist templates. Eleanor’s character serves as a «love interest, therapeutic friend, and conversational other». Highly educated in discussing poetry and philosophy, «Eleanor not only posits her desires in juxtaposition to the lingering expectations of women in her day but also serves as soothsayer to the demands which would be placed on females».
Legacy and influence
As an experimental novel, This Side of Paradise both influenced later authors and awakened a generational self-consciousness among young Americans. Within months of its publication, critics foresaw the work as having a wide
