The Diamond as Big as the Ritz

John T. Unger, the son of a respectably wealthy family in the made-up Mississippi town of Hades, is sent to a fashionable boys' school in Boston where he befriends Percy Washington — a quiet boy who at the end of their first year invites John home for the summer. Percy lives in Montana, in a region no map shows. The journey there is a series of stranger and stranger transfers, ending in a car ride into a mountain so remote that John eventually understands the Washington family does not appear on any government register. The mountain itself is a single solid diamond. The family fortune, accumulated over four generations of careful concealment, depends absolutely on no one outside ever knowing.

Fitzgerald published the story in 1922, in Tales of the Jazz Age, two years before The Great Gatsby. It is the wildest of his early fictions and the most economical of his fables about American money. The Washington estate is a tour de force of imaginative excess — a private château staffed by enslaved Black workers whose grandparents were tricked into the mountain by being told the Civil War was lost by the North, gardens worked by Italian aviators kept perpetually in a pit lest they reveal the mountain's location to the outside world, a daughter who has never seen anything she has not been allowed to see. The horror is presented as casual aristocratic etiquette, and the satire bites all the harder for the elegance with which Fitzgerald lets it speak for itself.

The Diamond as Big as the Ritz rewards readers who know Fitzgerald only from Gatsby and want to see his imagination working at full extension, who appreciate the moral fable form executed with jazz-age elegance, and who recognize, in the Washingtons' increasingly desperate measures to preserve their secret, the unanswerable American question about how exactly the great fortunes have been kept. It is the most allegorical thing Fitzgerald wrote — and one of the most prescient pieces of American satire of the twentieth century.