ABSTRACT
By the time Fitzgerald was mustered out of the army in February, 1919, he was already well on his way to agreement with the lines of Rupert Brooke which became the epigraph and the source of the title for his rewritten first novel: “… Well this side of Paradise! …There’s little comfort in the wise”. With Scribners’ acceptance of This Side of Paradise, a new phase of Fitzgerald’s life opened. Hence, it seems well to look at the content of the novel. In This Side of Paradise, so largely based on his own experience, Fitzgerald tried to assess the general tendency of his life thus far. In regard to the quality of Fitzgerald’s “abandonment” of Catholicism, by stressing “as Fitzgerald perceived it,” the inference is offered that Fitzgerald had a somewhat distorted view of what may be called objective, orthodox Catholic teaching on the quest for truth, sexual morality, and the social order.
