This Side of Paradise: The autobiography of Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald’s career aspiration and love Disappointment

Novel is a literary work in the form of prose describing human life, attitude, action, even representing history, ect. There are many kinds of novel that can be found in the work of literature. One of them is an autobiographical novel. It is the novel whose story is based on the author’s experiences.

To get the proof that autobiographical novel is a novel that written based on the experience of the author, This Side of Paradise: an Autobiographical novel of Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald’s Career Aspiration and Love Disappointment is chosen as the subject of the study.

The purposes of the study are: To describe the portrayal of the maincharacter’s career aspiration in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, to describe the portrayal of the main character’s love disappointment in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, and to know how the main character’s career aspirations and love disappointment reflects the author’s.

This study uses biographical approach. According to Guerin (www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext 97) “It is an approach that sees a literary work chiefly, if not exclusively, as a reflection of the author’s life and times or the life and times of the characters in the work.” The data are taken from the original novel of Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald This Side of Paradise that was published by Scribner, New York, the United States (1920). It contains 191 pages, this novel divided into two parts, which a half of the second part written in a play.

From the result of the data analysis, it can be concluded that there are many Amory’s experiences can be found in This Side of Paradise that reflects F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life, they are first, his career aspiration; including his school (the two enters the same boarding school, prep school, and Princeton University), his literary works (both Amory and Fitzgerald starts to write at 13 years old and likes to comment social life), his joining Army (the two commissions as the second lieutenant). Second, love disappointment: his broken love with women where the two was ended by the women.

Finally, for the next researcher it is suggested to do the research in other aspects. Besides biographical aspects, the novel can also be analyzed using psychological, sociological, feminist, Marxist, histories and many more.