This Side of Paradise is set in a world of wealth and privilege during the Jazz Age. The plot plays out against the backdrop of Amory Blaine's luxurious familial estate amongst the midwestern "aristocracy" in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, the elite halls of Princeton, the overwhelming mess of New York City, and the front lines of World War One.
Where many works from this period focus on the impact of World War One on the main generation—the so-called "lost generation—involved in fighting it, Fitzgerald was one of the first authors to concern himself with the younger generation who would have just missed the bulk of the fighting. At the end of the novel, he defines this generation:
[...] a new generation, the chosen youth from the muddled, unchastened world, still fed romantically on the mistakes and half-forgotten dreams of dead statesmen and poets. Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a reverie of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty grey turmoil to allow 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 [...].
This Side of Paradise is thus a chronicle of the rise of the Jazz Age, the unprecedented period of American wealth, decadence, hedonism, and excess in which Amory comes of age. Its setting, in a way, is Amory's generation itself, as he and the people around him strive to make sense of the rapidly changing American cultural landscape.
