Rediscovering Fitzgerald.

ESSAYS; THIS Side of Paradise (Book : Fitzgerald); COLLEGE students; COLLEGE graduates; HUMANITIES; LITERARY criticism; FITZGERALD, F. Scott (Francis Scott), 1896-1940

Presents literary criticism in which the author shares his experiences of a literary journey. In the experience of language a moment may come when one truly discovers that there is another dimension to the experience of words, that language may convey much more than one expects and, sometimes in complicated ways, it can have a beautiful power at once sensual and intellectual. As the New York Central train full of college students lurches southward through Massachusetts college towns and as frozen Dartmouth recedes north- ward, the car is full of pipe and cigarette smoke, and pints of whiskey are passed around. It is 1947, I am seventeen, and until now I have never heard of English writer Scott Fitzgerald. The great Fitzgerald boom as yet amounts to a mere tremor. A friend has just told me to read "This Side of Paradise," a college novel; and I have with me a copy from the Dartmouth library, a shabby volume rebound in buckram. As I read Fitzgerald's prose, beginning with the insouciant opening sentence, I am carried by the language, rhythms, surprises, brightness and constant daring.