and lasting impact on American literature. By 1922, in the wake of many literary imitators focusing on American youth and their hedonistic activities, critic John V. A. Weaver declared that «in a literary way, Fitzgerald’s influence is so great that it cannot be estimated.» «This Side of Paradise may not seem like much now,» writer Dorothy Parker recalled decades later, «but in 1920 it was considered an experimental novel; it cut new ground.»

In addition to its literary influence, the novel’s cultural impact purportedly made the «wild, keen, enthusiastic younger generation self-conscious,» according to Weaver, «it encouraged them to self-expression; to open revolt against the platitudes and polly-annalysis sic of precedent.» Novelist Gertrude Stein echoed Weaver’s assertions. Remarking upon the popular association between Fitzgerald and the flaming youth of the Jazz Age, Stein wrote in her memoir The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas that the author’s fiction essentially created this new generation in the public’s mind. «No generation of Americans has had a chronicler so persuasive and unmaudlin» as Fitzgerald, critic Burke Van Allen wrote, and no author was so identified with the generation recorded.

The popular identification of Fitzgerald as the chronicler of carefree youth and proselytizer of Jazz Age hedonism earned him the lifelong and posthumous enmity of reactionary societal figures. When he died in 1940, social conservatives rejoiced over his death. In a The New York World-Telegram column, Westbrook Pegler wrote that Fitzgerald’s death a few weeks prior reawakened «memories of a queer bunch of undisciplined and self-indulgent brats who were determined not to pull their weight in the boat and wanted the world to drop everything and sit down and bawl with them. A kick in the pants and a clout over the scalp were more like their needing.» Due to this widespread perception of Fitzgerald and his works, the Baltimore Diocese denied him a Catholic burial and refused his family permission to intern him at St. Mary’s Church in Rockville, Maryland.

Shortly after Fitzgerald’s death, American essayist and critic Glenway Wescott commented on the joy and vitriol by social conservatives regarding Fitzgerald’s death and opined that they could never erase the impact and legacy of Fitzgerald’s debut novel upon both the 1920s decade and the Jazz Age generation. «Self-congratulatory moral persons may crow over him if they wish,» Wescott wrote in a 1941 editorial, but «This Side of Paradise haunted the decade like a song, popular but perfect. It hung over an entire youth movement like a banner, somewhat discolored and windworn now; the wind has lapsed out of it. But a book which college boys really read is a rare thing, not to be dismissed idly or in a moment of severe sophistication.»