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“A Love-Hate Relationship”: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Money Management and “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”

F. Scott Fitzgerald was notoriously inept with regard to managing his vast income at the height of his literary success, leading a hedonistic lifestyle and spending faster than he could earn. This paper seeks to understand Fitzgerald's inability to control money and his compulsion to record his attitudes towards money through an analysis of his personal papers and his fiction and non-fiction writings. Fitzgerald's obsession with money is contextualised here within the US economy of the 1920s, in which the rise of new credit facilities led to a social conflict between the imperatives of saving and spending, a problem which Fitzgerald's fiction confronts, as evidenced by a close reading of his 1922 short story, “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”. In this light, both the plot and the fragmented structure of the story are interpreted as symptomatic of an irresolvable conflict between past and future, metaphorised by the symbol of money, which had acquired the contradictory characteristics of stability and instability, potential and fear in 1920s American society.