F. Scott Fitzgerald :This Side of Paradise followed by The Beautiful and Damned

Book excerpt: The novel's new incarnation, "This Side of Paradise", a largely autobiographical story about love and greed, was centered on Amory Blaine, an ambitious Midwesterner who falls in love with, but is ultimately rejected by, two girls from high-class families. The novel was published in 1920 to glowing reviews and, almost overnight, turned Fitzgerald, at the age of 24, into one of the country's most promising young writers. One week after the novel's publication, he married Zelda Sayre in New York. They had one child, a daughter named Frances Scott Fitzgerald, born in 1921. In 1922, Fitzgerald published his second novel, "The Beautiful and Damned", the story of the troubled marriage of Anthony and Gloria Patch. The Beautiful and Damned helped to cement his status as one of the great chroniclers and satirists of the culture of wealth, extravagance and ambition that emerged during the affluent 1920s-what became known as the Jazz Age.