Of all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's shorter works, 'The Diamond equally Big as the Ritz' is perhaps the most celebrated and widely studied. Published in 1922, 'The Diamond as Big as the Ritz' appears to foreshadow a number of prominent elements of Fitzgerald's novel, The Not bad Gatsby, published iii years later.

The story tells of a young man who goes to visit a schoolfriend at the family habitation in the mountains during the holidays. This friend is from a family so rich that, he boasts, his father owns a diamond every bit big as the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. You lot can read 'The Diamond equally Large as the Ritz' here earlier proceeding to our summary and analysis of Fitzgerald'due south story below.

'The Diamond equally Big as the Ritz': plot summary

At school, a beau named John T. Unger meets an even wealthier boy, Percy Washington, who tells Unger that his father is and then rich he owns a diamond that is as large as the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. When the school twelvemonth is over that summer, Washington takes Unger to go and stay with his family at their chateau in Montana, where Unger learns the family unit's secret: Washington'southward grandfather had got lost in the mountains one twenty-four hour period when a squirrel had led him to an untapped diamond mine, which turned out to be a behemothic mountain that was one vast diamond.

Because selling such a large diamond would be impractical, and even selling large diamonds mined from the mountain would attract suspicion from the authorities, the Washingtons gradually and tactically sell off smaller parts of the mountain to enhance their colossal wealth. Percy Washington'south father has resorted to elaborate trickery to avoid the expanse around the mountain being surveyed by the US government, then the mount remains its own contained, undercover enclave.

Then he stopped mining the diamond, having raised enough wealth to keep himself and the Washington family unit in luxury for generations to come up. The important thing now is to keep the existence of the diamond mount a secret. He is attended by black slaves who take been kept in ignorance about the fact that slavery was abolished in the Usa decades agone, and so that they believe their fate is somehow normal.

John meets Kismine, Percy'southward sixteen-yr-erstwhile sister, and falls in love with her. The pair resolve to get married the following June. They know that Kismine's father volition never concur to this, so they volition accept to elope in secret. However, while talking with her one solar day, John discovers that Kismine'south male parent has invited girls to socialise with her and her sis on the estate, only to have them murdered with poison before they could exit in late summer, to ensure they could never breathe a discussion of the place to anyone.

Meanwhile, John discovers that a group of aviators who had flown over the Washingtons' state and been shot downwards have been imprisoned in a pit on the golf class; 1 man, who was immune out to teach Italian to the daughters, has escaped from the estate and there have been fourteen accounts (of dubious actuality) of the homo beingness apprehended and killed, because Percy'southward father has put out such a vast reward for whoever catches the escaped human.

Mr Braddock Washington, Percy'southward father, is an 'exacting' man who had engineered the kidnap of a number of people, including an architect, a landscape gardener, and a poet, but they proved to be useless when bars to the estate. They had all gone mad and and then they had been permitted to leave – so they could be transported to an insane aviary, where whatsoever babblings near the diamond mountain would exist dismissed as the ramblings of madmen.

John realises that he volition face the same fate as the girls Mr Washington had poisoned in their sleep if he doesn't make his escape. Kismine insists that he take her with him. That nighttime, John wakes to strange noises outside his room and wanders out to notice Braddock Washington with 3 of his black slaves, clearly called to attend to some emergency.

John goes to find Kismine and discovers that the Italian who had escaped had raised the warning to the outside world and the estate is being surrounded past aeroplanes. They plan to exit, with John telling Kismine to stuff her pockets with jewels from her drawer. Shortly subsequently this, the planes start dropping bombs on the chateau and its surrounding buildings. When the shelling has ceased, John finds Braddock Washington with a big diamond, presenting it to God as an offer in return for safe delivery from assault. In that location is a rumble of thunder, which John interprets as God's rejection of this bribe.

Equally John rushes to go off the mountain with Kismine and Jasmine, he sees Mr and Mrs Washington and their son Percy dropping into a trapdoor into the mount, presumably down to a secret tunnel through which they plan to escape. But so the whole mountain blows up, engulfing the aviators and the chateau and destroying everything. John discovers that Jasmine opened the wrong jewellery drawer and, instead of leaving with some diamonds which they could sell and so they could alive comfortably off the proceeds, she has brought only worthless rhinestones. The three of them decide to live in relative poverty together in Hades.

'The Diamond as Big as the Ritz': analysis

'The Diamond as Big equally the Ritz' is a curious blend of fantasy and realism which, in some respects, anticipates the use of magic realism by afterwards twentieth-century writers. In 1922, however, the story's hybrid elements made information technology difficult for F. Scott Fitzgerald to find a publisher for information technology; it was eventually published in The Smart Set magazine under the title 'The Diamond in the Sky'.

But in fact, the genres which Fitzgerald plundered for 'The Diamond as Large every bit the Ritz' are even more numerous than this. Indeed, the story is often analysed as a modern fairy tale, with Kismine representing the princess in the palace whom the relatively obscure (and less wealthy) hero, John, falls in love with. Certainly, the idea of a castle where people mysteriously disappear echoes a number of archetype fairy tales, such as in the tale of Bluebeard's disappearing wives; it's worth bearing in mind, also, that the Washingtons' business firm on the mount is described as a 'chateau', from the Quondam French meaning 'castle'.

In other respects, 'The Diamond as Big as the Ritz' represents Fitzgerald's take on the Gothic novel, and the story can be analysed as an updating of the Gothic tale, with the mysterious castle set amidst a forbidding landscape being transformed into the Washingtons' chateau in the mountains. Other primal ingredients of the Gothic genre – the family harbouring a dark ancestral surreptitious, the foreign noises heard and shadows glimpsed at nighttime, the mysterious disappearance of those who visit the castle – are also present.

Because of these disparate influences, it is difficult to categorise 'The Diamond as Big as the Ritz'. It is unusual in Fitzgerald's catechism in containing so many different borrowings from diverse literary genres and traditions. At the same time, certain elements conspicuously prefigure Fitzgerald's most famous work, The Not bad Gatsby (which nosotros take analysed hither), a novel which Fitzgerald began working on presently afterwards completing 'The Diamond every bit Big as the Ritz'.

The story acts as a forerunner to that more ambitious piece of work: we have the not-overly-wealthy protagonist existence ushered into the fabulously opulent globe of another character; the dark secret which lurks behind their wealth; the tragic denouement; and the acknowledgment of the slave labour and manual work which keeps the wealthy sustained in their state of luxury. (If Gatsby gives us the Valley of Ashes, 'The Diamond as Large every bit the Ritz' constantly reminds united states of the literal slave labour that underpins Washington's existence on his mount.)

Indeed, the descriptions of opulence in the dreamy world of the Washington chateau seem to prefigure Nick Carraway'southward descriptions, in Gatsby, of floating trays of cocktails that seem to glide through the Edenic garden of the title character'southward habitation: when the third-person narrator of 'Diamond' describes the chateau as a kind of 'floating fairyland' where the marble of the building 'melted in grace', there is a distinct air of unreality to the place which we also notice in Carraway's response to Gatsby's mansion.

And similar Gatsby, 'The Diamond as Big as the Ritz' is a critique of American capitalism, whereby the Washingtons – their very name summoning both the first US President, from whom they are said to be descended, and that purveyor of American fairy tales, Washington Irving – only savour their obscene wealth at all because they must sit down, quite literally, on a dark hush-hush. Their mount contains enough diamond to feed everyone in America, but the irony is that, if the giant diamond were known nigh, it would reduce the value of diamonds everywhere to virtually nothing, because they would no longer be a rarity. The chateau on elevation of the diamond mountain is a neat symbol of how illusory wealth is, and how commercialism relies on the few owning a nifty deal and the many owning very lilliputian.