The Diamond as Big as the Ritz

The Diamond as Big as the Ritz
By F. Scott Fitzgerald

In “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” a young man from the south, John T. Unger, is sent north to a boarding school near Boston. In his sophomore year he is assigned a mysterious roommate named Percy Washington, who seldom speaks but invites Unger to his home “somewhere in the west” to spend the summer.  On the way he boasts that his father is the richest man in the world and has a diamond “bigger than the Ritz-Carlton Hotel” on their property, which turns out to be in Montana on the only five square miles in the entire country that has never been surveyed.  While it seems to be a ridiculous boast, it turns out to be true, and the Washington family has gone to extraordinary lengths to keep their giant diamond holdings a secret and to control the market for diamonds.  Airplanes are shot down and airmen are jailed.  Visitors regularly die of a mysterious disease.  Unger falls for Percy’s sister, who lets him in on his imminent downfall.  Alas, the secret gets out, invaders appear, disaster occurs, and some perish while others survive. The premise and the plot of the story have made it popular since it first appeared in 1922.  It has been adapted by Orson Welles and others for radio, for the Kraft Theatre in television, for cartoons in Mickey Mouse No. 57, and by Jimmy Buffet on his 1995 album Barometer Soup.