Pryor has a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Michigan and over twenty years experience in professional and creative writing with special interest in fiction. In the following essay, she demonstrates how “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” can be interpreted as an allegory for political events in Fitzgerald’s time.

Because F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” is written so like a fable, it is natural for the reader to try and ferret out a moral, a lesson to be learned. Is it a cautionary tale against greed and materialism? An indictment of the entire capitalist system? Or an allegory for something else entirely?

Read in the light of these historical events, ‘The Diamond as Big as the Ritz’ can be interpreted as a political allegory in which the theme...