Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (1920)[128]
The impact of Fitzgerald's debut novel This Side of Paradise upon societal mores at the time of its publication has been extensively discussed by scholars and critics.[8][14] With his debut novel, Fitzgerald became the first writer to turn the national spotlight upon the so-called Jazz Age generation.[10][8] In contrast to the older Lost Generation to which Fitzgerald and Hemingway belonged,[11] the Jazz Age generation were those younger Americans who had been adolescents during World War I and were largely untouched by the conflict's psychological and material horrors.[a][12][13]
Fitzgerald riveted the nation's attention upon the hedonistic activities of their sons and daughters cavorting in the rumble seat of a Bearcat roadster and sparked a societal debate over their perceived immorality.[130][131][132] Due to this thematic focus, his works became a sensation among college students, and the American national press depicted him as the standard-bearer for youth in revolt.[4] "No generation of Americans has had a chronicler so persuasive and unmaudlin" as Fitzgerald, critic Burke Van Allen wrote in 1934, and no author was so identified with the generation recorded.[116]
Remarking upon the popular association between Fitzgerald and the flaming youth of the Jazz Age, Gertrude Stein wrote in her memoir The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas that the author's fiction essentially created this new generation in the public's mind.[133] Echoing this assertion, critics John V. A. Weaver and Edmund Wilson insisted that Fitzgerald imbued the Jazz Age generation with the gift of self-consciousness while simultaneously making the public aware of them as a distinctive cohort.[8][9]
The perception of Fitzgerald as the chronicler of the Jazz Age hedonism and carefree youth led many societal figures to denounce his writings.[134] Social conservatives such as Heywood Broun decried his use of modern slang and went so far as to claim that Fitzgerald wholly fabricated his depiction of young people engaging in drunken sprees and premarital sex.[135] Fitzgerald publicly ridiculed such criticisms,[136] and he opined that many pundits wished to discredit his works in order to retain their outdated conceptions of American society.[137]
As a result of This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald became regarded as "the outstanding aggressor in the little warfare which divided our middle classes in the twenties—warfare of moral emancipation against moral conceit, flaming youth against old guard".[15] When he died in 1940, social conservatives rejoiced over his death.[138] In one column for The New York World-Telegram, journalist Westbrook Pegler wrote that Fitzgerald's death a few weeks prior reawakened "memories of a queer bunch of undisciplined and self-indulgent brats who were determined not to pull their weight in the boat and wanted the world to drop everything and sit down and bawl with them. A kick in the pants and a clout over the scalp were more like their needing."[17]
