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INSPIRED BY THIS SIDE OF PARADISE

I’m restless. My whole generation is restless.

—Amory Blaine, in This Side of Paradise

Gertrude Stein had been very much impressed by This Side of Paradise. She read it when it came out and before she knew any of the young American writers. She said of it that it was this book that really created for the public the new generation.

—Gertrude Stein, from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)

Fitzgerald and the Jazz Age

F. Scott Fitzgerald was the literary hero of the Jazz Age. His first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), successfully harnessed the frenetic energy of that era. Fitzgerald said the Jazz Age began on May Day, 1919, and ended in October 1929, after the infamous crash of the stock market that heralded the economic depression of the 1930s. During that time American culture began its obsession with youth, fashion, money, music, liquor, and sex. This Side of Paradise, unlike many literary remembrances of the era, captured the spirit of the decade as it came into being. The novel’s timeliness was signaled by its extreme popularity, particularly among young people.

Fitzgerald chronicled the Jazz Age for most of his career. The short story collection Flappers and Philosophers (1920) introduced the personality—the flapper—that, like Fitzgerald, came to emblematize the era. Flappers were pert women who wore makeup, bobbed their hair, hiked up their skirts, and rebelled against the constraints the older generation tried to impose upon them. Fitzgerald captured the decadence of the Jazz Age in his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), which describes the dissolute life of the drunken Anthony Patch, heir to millions. Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), another short-story collection, contains the lushly told “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” a tale about a man who comes to live a life of grandeur that is on a mythical scale.

Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, The Great Gatsby (1925), has been called the finest novel ever written by an American. The story follows the strangely dispassionate Nick Carraway as he observes the vicious feuding of Tom and Daisy Buchanan and cautiously befriends his neighbor Jay Gatsby, a gracious but disconcerting new millionaire who throws lavish backyard parties but destroys himself pursuing a lost love. Fitzgerald’s last finished novel, Tender Is the Night (1934), is set on the French Riviera, where it traces an ill-fated triangle formed between the young actress Rosemary Hoyt and the unstable couple Dick and Nicole Diver. Of all the writers of that era, Fitzgerald best captured the hope, excitement, glamour, and degeneration of America’s first modern decade.

Other Jazz Age Writers

New York City, which boasted glittering nightlife, a lively bohemian scene, and large numbers of extremely wealthy people, was the center of the Jazz Age. Most of the writers connected with the era worked either in New York or in Europe. Fitzgerald, for example, penned many of the works discussed above while living in Paris among a circle of expatriates that included Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. Among the New York set was Dorothy Parker, a bitterly funny writer and poet closely associated with the New Yorker magazine. She immortalized the new woman of the 1920s in a poem, “The Flapper” (1922), which pays tribute to the author of This Side of Paradise:

The playful flapper here we see,
The fairest of the fair.
She’s not what Grandma used to be,—
You might say, au contraire.
Her girlish ways may make a stir,
Her manners cause a scene,
But there is no more harm in her
Than in a submarine.

She nightly knocks for many a goal
The usual dancing men.
Her speed is great, but her control
Is something else again.
All spotlights focus on her pranks.
All tongues her prowess herald.
For which she well may render thanks
To God and Scott Fitzgerald.

Her golden rule is plain enough—
Just get them young and treat them rough.

One of Parker’s lighter pieces, “The Flapper” contains touches of the cynicism that later became her trademark.

Writing at the same time as Parker and Fitzgerald was Edna St. Vincent Millay, a New York bohemian who was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. The short poem “First Fig” (1920), one of her best-known verses, captures the excesses of the Jazz Age with vivid symbolic imagery:

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light.

The poem anticipates the brilliant debuts and abrupt deaths of luminaries such as Fitzgerald, who died at forty-four after a long battle with drinking; it also calls to mind the emotional breakdowns of his wife, Zelda.

Where This Side of Paradise portrays the restlessness of Amory Blaine during college and immediately thereafter, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) describes the travails of a slightly older group. The novel—which opens with Gertrude Stein’s famous line “You are all a lost generation”—revolves around a crew of emotionally downtrodden expatriates living in Paris. In tough, understated prose, narrator Jake Barnes describes the trip the motley group takes to Pamplona, Spain, to see the running of the bulls. In a larger sense, the aimlessness of the principal characters represents the widespread hopelessness and disillusionment people felt following World War I.

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