Increasingly disillusioned by the rejection slips that sudded the walls of his room and his on/off engagement to Zelda Sayre, Fitzgerald began his third revision of the novel that was to become This Side of Paradise. The story of a young man's painful sexual and intellectual awakening that echoes Fitzgerald's own career, it is also a portrait of the lost generation that followed straight on from the First World War, 'grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken' and wanting money and success more than anything else.