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Plot summary. John T. Unger, a teenager from the Mississippi River town of Hades, is sent to a private boarding school near Boston. During the summer he visits the homes of his classmates, the majority of whom are from wealthy families. In the middle of his sophomore year, a young man named Percy Washington is placed in Unger's dorm.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
- June 1922
- 1922
- Novella
A story of a young man who falls in love with a rich girl and discovers her family's dark secrets. The story blends fantasy and realism, and foreshadows Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby.
The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, allegorical short story about lost illusions, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1922 in Tales of the Jazz Age. John T. Unger, a student at an exclusive Massachusetts prep school, befriends Percy Washington, a new classmate who boasts that his father is “the.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
“The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” is a story full of symbolic and allegorical touches, many of them dealing with the soul-destroying potential of wealth. The hero, named Unger, is avid...
- Introduction
- Author Biography
- Plot Summary
- Characters
- Topics For Further Study
- Themes
- Style
- Compare & Contrast
- Historical Context
- Critical Overview
F. Scott Fitzgerald's story "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" first appeared in the June 1922 issue of The Smart Set, a popular magazine of the 1920s. Fitzgerald had attempted to sell it to the Saturday Evening Post, which had published many of his other stories, but its harsh anticapitalistic message was rejected by the conservative magazine. In Se...
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896, to Edward and Mary ("Mollie") Fitzgerald. In 1898, the family moved to upstate New York, where Edward worked as a salesman for Procter and Gamble. By the time the family returned to St. Paul, Fitzgerald was twelve years old, and his parents enrolled him at St. Paul...
As "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" opens, sixteen-year-old John T. Unger is leaving the small middle-class town of Hades to attend St. Midas School near Boston, "the most expensive and the most exclusive boys' preparatory school in the world." His mother packs his trunk, his father gives him money, and after a tearful goodbye, John T. Unger is off...
The Prisoners
Underneath his all-green golf course, Braddock Washington has imprisoned two dozen aviators who had the misfortune to discover his property. They are a spirited bunch, shouting curses and defiant insults at Washington when he stops by for a visit but also trying to talk him into releasing them. When they hear that one of their number managed to escape, they dance and sing in celebration.
John T. Unger
John T. Unger is a young man from the town of Hades, "a small town on the Mississippi River." His family is affluent, but not as fabulously wealthy as the other families whose sons attend the exclusive St. Midas School. He is more sentimental than the ultra-narcissistic Washingtons (when he parts with his father to leave for school, there are "tears streaming from his eyes,") but his blind adoration of wealth and the wealthy reveal him to be almost as shallow. The few early misgivings he has...
Braddock Washington
The patriarch of the Washington family and the most extreme example of its arrogance and self-importance, Braddock Washington is a cold, unfeeling man who is "utterly uninterested in any ideas or opinions except his own." He views people as either assets or liabilities, calculating what use can be made of them or what obstacle they might present. The most extreme example of this is his continued use of slave labor. Kismine echoes her father's attitude when the attacking aircraft destroy the s...
In telling the Washington family history, Fitzgerald refers to several actual historical figures. Research the following names and write a short paragraph for each one, indicating the relevance of...Research the size of the world's largest diamonds. How do they compare to the size of the Washington's diamond? Make a chart comparing the size of the top three diamonds to each other and to the fi...Using the description of the Washingtons' chateau as a guide, draw or paint your own representation of the outside of the chateau, the interior, or one of the rooms described (John T. Unger's room...Fitzgerald uses exaggeration to make the Washingtons' home and lifestyle as outrageously lavish as possible. Try the opposite: Use exaggeration to describe, in a few paragraphs, the smallest and mo...Immorality of the Wealthy
A common theme in Fitzgerald's work is that extreme wealth often leads to immoral behavior. In the case of the Washingtons, this effect is compounded by their near complete isolation from the rest of the world. Percy, Kismine, and Jasmine were brought up to believe they are better than all others by virtue of their fortune, and they were sheltered from anyone who might challenge this notion. Imprisoning or killing visitors who might divulge their secrets has become a routine business tactic f...
Freedom and Imprisonment
While most people equate greater wealth with greater freedom, this is not the case in "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz." Braddock Washington's prison is a luxurious one, to be sure, but it still isolates him from the rest of the world. He has no friends or colleagues, only slaves. He views others with suspicion. His children's visitors must be killed when their visit is over—certainly an impediment to their forming lasting friendships outside the family. His entire family is imprisoned by the...
American Idolatry of Wealth
John T. Unger personifies the fascination that the American middle class has with wealth and the wealthy. John quotes statistics about the number of millionaires in the United States, prattles on about the jewels owned by the Schnlitzer-Murphys, and sets aside his few reservations about the morals of the Washingtons when he sees their opulent home. According to Fitzgerald, John has been trained to feel this awe for wealth by his family and his hometown: "The simple piety prevalent in Hades ha...
Point of View
"The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" is told from the third person point of view, from the perspective of John T. Unger. Through Unger's perspective, Fitzgerald condemns not just the Washingtons' amoral lifestyle, but also the middle-class attitude towards wealth that makes their lifestyle possible. The reader waits in vain for Unger to speak out, to express some outrage or horror at the Washingtons' way of life, but until his own life is threatened, Unger seems willing to overlook almost anythin...
Mythical Allusions
Many references to myths and fables make the story seem more like a fable itself. On the first page, when the reader learns that John is from Hades—the underworld of the dead in Greek myth—the story veers from the path of realism into the realm of fantasy. Characters in the story repeatedly make reference to how hot it is in Hades ("Is it hot enough for you down there?"), and when John leaves to go to St. Midas—another reference to a fable—his father assures him that "we'll keep the home fire...
Hyperbole
Fitzgerald's use of hyperbole, or extreme exaggeration, increases the feeling of fantasy, and his descriptions of the Washingtons' home have a surreal quality. By making the chateau impossibly luxurious, Fitzgerald lets the reader know, once again, that this is not a literal or realistic story: A diamond as big as an entire mountain, a clear crystal bathtub with tropical fish swimming beneath the glass, hallways lined with fur, dinner plates of solid diamond, a car interior upholstered in tap...
1920s: Though more women are joining the workforce (21 percent of women aged sixteen and over—though most of them hold clerical, domestic, or factory jobs), women are still generally discouraged fr...1920s: Following World War I, the United States retreats into isolationism. Congress votes against joining the League of Nations, paranoia about communism is rampant, and immigration is restricted....1920s: In 1920, the yearly tuition at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, one of the country's most exclusive prep schools, is two hundred and fifty dollars. In the story, John T. Unger atten...Isolationism and Prohibition
Before World War II (1939-1945), the United States had a tendency towards isolationism; Woodrow Wilson won reelection in 1916 running on the slogan, "He Kept Us Out of War." However, the next year the United States entered World War I, after German submarines sank the Lusitania, killing nearly twelve hundred people, among whom were over one hundred children and one hundred and twenty Americans. By the time "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" was published, the war had been over for almost four y...
Postwar Economic Boom
The decade following World War I (1914-1918) was a prosperous time for the United States. More efficient methods of production had developed during the war to compensate for the reduced workforce. Now this increased productivity meant higher wages for workers and also shorter work hours, giving Americans both the means and the leisure to buy more goods. A new age of consumerism was born. This was good news for Fitzgerald, whose stories often featured the antics of the extremely wealthy and fr...
New Freedoms for Women
Women won the right to vote in 1920, and they joined the workforce in greater numbers during this decade. These new freedoms, coupled with the prosperity of the times, gave birth to flappers, a term that refers to certain irreverent young women who challenged traditional mores with their shocking manner of dress, cropped hairstyles, and risqué attitudes towards men and romance. Fitzgerald first rose to fame with his stories about flappers, and stories such as "Bernice Bobs Her Hair," "The Off...
"The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" appeared in Fitzgerald's second volume of short stories, titled Tales of the Jazz Age (1922). Reviews of this collection were mixed, though many reviewers found it a definite improvement over his first collection, Flappers and Philosophers. In a review in the St. Paul Daily News, Woodward Boyd calls the collection "...
Buy Study Guide. Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald Summary and Analysis of "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" Summary. This is the adventure of John T. Unger from the Southern town of Hades who was sent to acquire his New England education at St Midas’ school. He is invited to spend a summer holiday with Percy Washington.
THE DIAMOND AS BIG AS THE RITZby F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1922. Called a masterpiece by Matthew J. Bruccoli, F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Diamond As Big As the Ritz," written in 1921 and published the following year in Tales of the Jazz Age, has elicited a great deal of critical interest for many reasons. Fitzgerald had married in 1920, and his ...
