The Diamond as Big as the Ritz
Complete textJohn T. Unger leaves his small hometown for an exclusive school and accepts a wealthy classmate's invitation to visit. The journey introduces a household whose astonishing riches depend on secrecy, making luxury progressively harder to separate from the arrangements that protect it.
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The story enlarges the language of wealth until familiar aspirations become fantastic and disturbing. John's susceptibility to beautiful surroundings matters as much as the hosts' extravagance. Comic names and luxurious detail invite amusement while exposing how admiration can delay questions about what comfort requires from unseen people.
Reading focus
Pay attention to the moments when John's admiration of luxury postpones his questions about its conditions.
This reading edition contains 14,950 words in 11 original sections. Read the text online with adjustable type and three colour themes, or keep a printable PDF.
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald. Language: English. Reading edition: 28 October 2026.
Opening excerpt
John T. Unger came from a family that had been well known in Hades—a small town on the Mississippi River—for several generations. John’s father had held the amateur golf championship through many a heated contest; Mrs. Unger was known “from hot-box to hot-bed,” as the local phrase went, for her political addresses; and young John T. Unger, who had just turned sixteen, had danced all the latest dances from New York before he put on long trousers. And now, for a certain time, he was to be away from home. 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. Nothing would…
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This edition contains the complete English literary text, with 11 sections and 14,950 words. This reading edition preserves the checked English text and its section order. No study notes have been added.
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