ision was never sent to battle, he was not to fulfill his second main dream. Once he finished his novel, Fitzgerald sent it twice to the publisher Scribner's who sent it back both times, telling its author to revise his book. After a second, major revision Fitzgerald finally accomplished a novel worth selling that was now to be called This Side of Paradise. Through the person of Amory Blaine, hero of the novel, Fitzgerald described quite a lot of his own past, his attempts to fit in with the rich crowd, his failures in life, the values he had learned. He poured everything he knew and experienced into it. During the first few weeks of the book's publication he wrote: "I don't want to talk about myself because I'll admit that I did that somewhat in this book. In fact to write it took three months; to conceive it – three minutes; to collect the data in it – all my life. (qtd. in Greenfeld 59). Later in his life, Fitzgerald would attempt to write a novel not based on his life, the novel was to be called The Count of Darkness. In the end he only wrote four installments of the story and they were terrible. "They're the clearest example of what his work could be when he was not writing out of personal experience" (Mizener 280).
             Amory of This Side of Paradise not only lived the events that his author had lived, but also shared the same physical traits. At 18 years old, "he had rather a young face, the ingenuousness of which was marred by the penetrating green eyes fringed with long dark eyelashes" (Fitzgerald 63). The people that Amory knew during his childhood, his Princeton year, and during the war were all based on individuals that Fitzgerald had met throughout that same time. Father Fay, to whom the author dedicated his book, was probably his greatest influence. How much Fitzgerald admired him is apparent from the portrayal of him as Father D'arcy in This ...