Audiobook · read by volunteers
This Side of Paradise
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
Read by Kristin Hughes (1974-2021), Kara Shallenberg (1969-2023), Robin Cotter, Kirsten Ferreri, J. M. Smallheer, pww214, Chris Hughes, Rosalind Wills, Claire Goget, Ana Simão · 22 chapters · 8 h 56
About the book
Amory Blaine is handsome, clever, and quite certain that he is destined for something. From a privileged boyhood he moves on to Princeton, where he is eager to become a figure on campus, and then out into a world changed forever by the First World War. Along the way there are friendships, flirtations, wounded pride and a series of romances that never quite turn out as he imagined.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel burst onto the scene in 1920 and gave a voice to a restless generation of young Americans who felt that the old certainties had gone. It mixes narrative with verse and playful dialogue, and it catches the energy and anxiety of youth with remarkable freshness. In twenty-two chapters and just under nine hours, you follow a character who is both appealing and infuriating, and who spends the book trying to find out who he really is.
Introduction
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) became the defining chronicler of the Jazz Age, the decade after the First World War in which American society seemed to be accelerating. This Side of Paradise was his debut novel, published in 1920, and its success made him famous almost overnight, when he was still in his twenties. The title is taken from a line in a poem by Rupert Brooke, “Tiare Tahiti.”
The book examines the lives and morals of young people after the war. Its protagonist, Amory Blaine, is a wealthy and attractive student at Princeton University, which Fitzgerald himself had attended, and the novel draws on the atmosphere of that world. It is loosely structured, a patchwork of scenes, poems and a kind of playscript, and critics have often noted that this makes it feel like youth itself: eager, inventive and a little unfinished. Later novels, including The Great Gatsby, would show a more polished control, but many readers value this first book precisely for its energy and candour.
The recording has 22 sections and lasts close to nine hours. It was made by volunteers for LibriVox, who share the reading between them. Listening to the novel in several voices suits a story about a young man trying out many identities.
Why listen now? Because the questions Amory asks, about ambition, love, money and what it means to become oneself, have not gone away. And because it is rewarding to hear one of the great American writers at the very start of his career, when everything seemed possible and the first reviews were still arriving.
Public domain
F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text