F Scott Fitzgerald

The Diamond as Big as the Ritz annotated F Scott Fitzgerald

You probably know F. Scott Fitzgerald as the author of the famous novel The Great Gatsby, but he's also well known for his many short stories published in the 1920s and 30s. "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" is one of his quirky, imaginative fantasy stories that also functions as social satire. It is the tale of a man who has discovered a giant mountain made of solid diamond - a diamond as big as the Ritz-Carlton Hotel - and now needs to keep it hidden from the world at all costs. The story is set in the woods of Montana and may be influenced by a trip Fitzgerald took to the area one summer with a buddy from Princeton University. Fitzgerald originally wrote "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" as a novelette (a very short novella, or a very long short story) called "The Diamond in the Sky." It was rejected by several magazines, so he tried trimming it down. It was then accepted and first published in June of 1922 in The Smart Set, an American literary magazine, though they paid him only $300 for it. (Compare this to the $1,500 that the Post was then paying for short stories, or the Fitzgerald got for "Babylon Revisited" in 1931). Shortly after in 1922, it was anthologized in a collection of Fitzgerald's stories called Tales of the Jazz Age (where you can also find "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button").