Literary critics
Many reviewers were enthusiastic about Fitzgerald's debut novel.[91] Burton Rascoe of the Chicago Tribune urged readers to "make a note of the name, F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is borne by a 23 year old novelist who will, unless I am much mistaken, be much heard of hereafter."[92] Rascoe asserted that Fitzgerald's first novel bore "the impress, it seems to me, of genius. It is the only adequate study that we have had of the contemporary American in adolescence and young manhood."[93] "The prize first novel of a decade is F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise," Fanny Butcher raved "a book which...will have a serious and far reaching effect on American literature."[94] In his influential review of the work in The Smart Set, critic H. L. Mencken described This Side of Paradise as "an amazing first novel" and heaped praise upon the young author:[90]
"The best American novel that I have seen of late is also the product of a neophyte, to wit, F. Scott Fitzgerald...In This Side of Paradise he offers a truly amazing first novel—original in structure, extremely sophisticated in manner, and adorned with a brilliancy that is as rare in American writing as honesty is in American statecraft. The young American novelist usually reveals himself as a naive, sentimental and somewhat disgusting ignoramus—a believer in Great Causes, a snuffler and eye-roller, a spouter of stale philosophies out of Kensington drawing rooms, the doggeries of French hack-drivers, and the lower floor of the Munich Hofbräuhaus...Fitzgerald is nothing of the sort. On the contrary, he is...an artist—an apt and delicate weaver of words, a clever hand, a sound workman. The first half of the story is far better than the second half. It is not that Fitzgerald's manner runs thin, but that his hero begins to elude him. What, after such a youth, is to be done with the fellow? The author's solution is anything but felicitous. He simply drops his Amory Blaine as Mark Twain dropped Huckleberry Finn, but for a less cogent reason. But down to and including the episode of the love affair with Rosalind the thing is capital, especially the first chapters."[95]
Although critics praised This Side of Paradise as highly original, they heavily criticized its form and construction.[96] Lillian C. Ford in the Los Angeles Times complained "the construction is odd and the book has two parts, the first with four chapters and the second with five. The chapters have unexpected topical divisions and when the author feels so inclined he throws his story into drama form and then again it jogs along as plain narrative."[97]
A critical consensus soon emerged that Fitzgerald's structural craftsmanship left much to be desired.[98] He could write entertainingly, his detractors conceded, but he gave scant attention to form and construction.[99] Having read these criticisms of his debut novel, Fitzgerald sought to improve upon the form and construction of his prose in his next work, The Beautiful and Damned, and to venture into a new genre of fiction altogether.[100]
Princeton backlash
John Grier Hibben, the president of Princeton University, criticized the work in a letter to Fitzgerald.Despite its widespread success with critics and readers, Princeton's faculty and older alumni reacted with hostility towards This Side of Paradise.[101] Although Christian Gauss, a Professor of French Literature at Princeton, publicly lauded This Side of Paradise as "a work of art,"[102] other Princetonians openly attacked the book in the pages of the Princeton Alumni Weekly, much to Fitzgerald's dismay.[101][103] In a public letter, Ralph Kent, a senior editor of the Nassau Literary Review, disparaged the work as impugning Princeton's reputation due to its sordid depiction of undergraduate life.[104] A recurrent criticism by Princetonians was that Fitzgerald's best-selling novel had fostered an unfavorable impression of their alma mater as populated by hedonistic degenerates solely interested in idle pleasures.[105]
In a private letter to Fitzgerald dated May 27, 1920,[106] John Grier Hibben, the president of Princeton University from 1912–1932, politely but firmly criticized Fitzgerald's depiction of the university in This Side of Paradise:[106]
"It is because I appreciate so much all that is in you of artistic skill and [a] certain elemental power that I am taking the liberty of telling you very frankly that your characterization of Princeton has grieved me. I cannot bear to think that our young men are merely living for four years in a country club and spending their lives wholly in a spirit of calculation and snobbishness...From my undergraduate days I have always had a belief in Princeton and in what the place could do in the making of a strong vigorous manhood. It would be an overwhelming grief to me, in the midst of my work here and my love for Princeton’s young men, should I feel that we have nothing to offer but the outgrown symbols and shells of a past whose reality has long since disappeared."[106]
In response to Hibben's correspondence, Fitzgerald wrote an apologetic explanation: "I have no fault to find with Princeton that I can't find with Oxford and Cambridge. I simply wrote out of my own impressions, wrote as honestly as I could a picture of its beauty. That the picture is cynical is the fault of my temperament...I must admit however that This Side of Paradise does over accentuate the gaiety and country club atmosphere of Princeton. For the sake of the readers interest that part was much over-stressed, and of course the hero, not being average, reacted rather unhealthily I suppose to many perfectly normal phenomena. To that extent the book is inaccurate."[107]
Shortly before his death, Fitzgerald recalled how his early happiness of being a published author ended "when Princeton turned on the book—not undergraduate Princeton but the black mass of faculty and alumni. There was a kind but reproachful letter from President Hibben, and a room full of classmates who suddenly turned on me with condemnation...The Alumni Weekly got after my book and only Dean Gauss had a good word to say or me. The unctuousness and hypocrisy of the proceedings was exasperating and for seven years I didn't go to Princeton."[101]
