: Like Fitzgerald’s later work, The Great Gatsby , this novel explores the obsession with the "money-god" and the struggle to maintain exclusivity in a materialistic world. Why It Stands Out Book Review: This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The story follows , a handsome and wealthy Midwesterner, through his formative years at Princeton and into a disillusioning young adulthood in New York City.

: Fitzgerald famously concludes the novel with the haunting observation that this generation has "grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken".