The Diamond as Big as the Ritz

By F. Scott Fitzgerald

Although this novella stands out from his body of work in that it’s a playful yet sinister fairy tale, it brilliantly fuses F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ongoing lush fantasies about the extremes of wealth with his much more somber understanding of what underpins it.  Loosely inspired by a summer he spent as a teenager working on a ranch in Montana, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz is Fitzgerald’s hallucinatory paean to the American West and all its promises.

It’s the story of John T. Unger, a young Southerner who goes to Montana for summer vacation with a wealthy college classmate. But the classmate’s family proves to be much more than simply wealthy: They own a mountain made entirely of one solid diamond. And they’ve gone to dreadful lengths to conceal their secret … meaning John could be in danger.

But the family also has a daughter, lovely Kismine, and with her help, John may yet escape the fate her family has meted out to all their other guests so far …

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jan 29, 2013
• ISBN: 9781612192215

F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896. He attended Princeton University, joined the United States Army during World War I, and published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920. That same year he married Zelda Sayre and for the next decade the couple lived in New York, Paris, and on the Riviera. Fitzgerald’s masterpieces include The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night. He died at the age of forty-four while working on The Last Tycoon. Fitzgerald’s fiction has secured his reputation as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century.

Reviews for The Diamond as Big as the Ritz

[madepercy-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Fitzgerald's ability to present a theme based on stories that are almost pedestrian constantly amazes me. Each story leaves me to ponder the meaning of the mundane and his ability to moralise, empathise, sympathise and then switch to humour and back again makes me wonder how much was packed into his relatively short life. Certainly makes me a fan of the short story.

[drfp_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A selection of Fitzgerald's "best short work" (according to the blurb on the back of this old paperback) from across his short story collections published in the 1920s.All the stories herein are of good quality though, not to sound too harsh, that's all they are. Competent stories every one of them, but none of them excite the way the best shorts do (such as those produced by the likes of Chekhov or Carver). There's also a faint wiff of repetition with all the stories revolving around the problems suffered by privileged white people from the coasts of America. A little more variety would certainly have gone a long way.No one story especially stood out more than the rest for me. They're all decent little stories, but nothing more and nothing less.