This side of paradise the beautiful and damned

Resumen del libro

With an Introduction and Notes by Lionel Kelly, University of Reading. This Side of Paradise tells the story of Amory Blaine, the only child of wealthy parents, whose journey from adolescence to adulthood follows him from prep school through to Princeton University, where his literary talents flourish, in contrast to his academic failure. A sequence of love affairs with beautiful young women are fatally damaged by the collapse of his family's fortune, and the novel ends with him poised to face the challenge of making his own way in the world.

Composed in an unconventional narrative mode, the novel is a rich fusion of satiric and romance idioms, and found a captivated audience on its publication in 1920. It made Fitzgerald rich and famous overnight. The Beautiful and Damned is a bleaker version of the corrosive power of wealth and its privileges, one of Fitzgerald's abiding subjects.

Anthony Patch, is heir to a huge fortune, whose marriage to the beautiful and indolent Gloria is increasingly shadowed by Anthony's fall into alcoholism. Though he wins a lawsuit to gain his inheritance of millions of dollars, it is a pyrrhic victory, for he is now a physically and morally broken man.

Biografía del autor

Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) fue uno de los mejores representantes de la literatura norteamericana del siglo XX e integró con otros notables escritores de su tiempo la llamada Generación Perdida. Sus cinco novelas y casi doscientas narraciones cortas retratan el espíritu brillante, ligero y desesperado de los años 20 y 30. Junto a su esposa, la también escritora Zelda Sayre, con la que viajó a los centros artísticos del momento: París, Nueva York y Hollywood, vivió aquella era del jazz a un ritmo trepidante que supo trasladar a sus escritos. A su primera e impactante novela, A este lado del paraíso, se sumaron Hermosos y malditos, El gran Gatsby, Suave es la noche y la póstuma El último magnate, que junto a los relatos, los ensayos y la correspondencia conforman el legado de un escritor ineludible.