The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, and Other Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I suppose that what draws me to his writing the most is the way he creates his characters, somehow managing to capture their very essence. There are many things about his writing that I like, from this subtle sadness and tenderness to the insightful observations about society and human kind.

In other words, for me he is so much more than just a writer who managed to capture the Jazz Age. He is brilliant at that, but it is not what makes his works classics. People always talk about Fitzgerald as a writer that defined the Jazz Age and as much as I’m interested in this particular time period, for me that is not that important. I will probably attempt to read all of his works, as I usually do, when I really really like some writer. He is a great writer, no doubt about that. The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night are, to this day, one of my favourite American novels. I always thought of him as a novelist, but now I see that is not where his talent ends. The young and the rich live in the worlds of their own device.Īfter reading this one, I must say that Fitzgerald seems to be just as brilliant when it comes to writing short stories. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion. That’s a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. And if one can open doors to riches any time, one’s youth never can be revisited… Youth and riches are two cherished treasures. “Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.” It is probably the most known quote of F. Midas… Does it ring a bell? Any tale beginning like this can’t fail. Midas’s School near Boston - Hades was too small to hold their darling and gifted son. Nothing would suit them but that he should go to St. That respect for a New England education which is the bane of all provincial places, which drains them yearly of their most promising young men, had seized upon his parents.

And now, for a certain time, he was to be away from home. Unger, who had just turned sixteen, had danced all the latest dances from New York before he put on long trousers. Unger was known “from hot-box to hot-bed,” as the local phrase went, for her political addresses and young John T.

John’s father had held the amateur golf championship through many a heated contest Mrs. Unger came from a family that had been well known in Hades - a small town on the Mississippi River - for several generations. Scott Fitzgerald was a brilliant satirist: sharp-eyed and sharp-witted…

The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, and Other Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald