The Diamond As Big As The Ritz

Description

The Diamond as Big as the Ritz is a playful yet sinister fairy tale, brilliantly fusing F. Scott Fitzgerald's typically lush fantasies about the extremes of wealth with his rather more sombre understanding of what underpins it. Loosely inspired by a summer he spent as a teenager working on a ranch in Montana, this unique novella is Fitzgerald's hallucinatory paean to the American West and all its promises.

FRANCIS SCOTT FITZGERALD was born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1896, the son of a salesman, and namesake of his distant relative, Francis Scott Key. While attending Princeton University, he wrote a novel that a Scribner's editor thought good enough to publish, if Fitzgerald would revise it. Fitzgerald, however, was in academic trouble and left school to join the army. Stationed in Alabama, he met and proposed marriage to Zelda Sayre, who refused to marry him until his rewritten novel, This Side of Paradise, made him an irresistible success. Two years later, the Fitzgeralds were leading a furious, booze-fueled social life, and his story collection of 1922,Tales of the Jazz Age, gave the era its name. In 1925, while sojourning in France-where he befriended Ernest Hemingway-he wrote The Great Gatsby. But his relationship with Zelda grew destructive, and by 1932 she was in a mental institution and he had descended into alcoholism. Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood to work as a scriptwriter, and died there of a heart attack in 1940.