Sometimes when a historian turns to a literary figure the results are refreshing. Think of David Donald writing about Thomas Wolfe and now David S. Brown on Fitzgerald. I doubt that a literary critic could have written Brown’s account of a masterpiece, “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”: “Scott’s critical account of the colonizing of the American West anticipates a school of historiography that would begin to gain influence in the 1970s and 1980s.” Brown calls the story a “powerful condemnation of greed, a direct rebuke to the speculative orgy that was already then coming to grip the 1920s.” The story was too much for The Saturday Evening Post, which regularly paid Fitzgerald $1,500 per story, and he had to accept $300 for its appearance in Smart Set, H. L. Mencken’s bolder magazine unconcerned about ruffling Americans’ good feelings about prosperity. The story is set on the Montana ranch and homestead of Percy Washington, a direct descendant of the president. It is also the home of that diamond, the size of a small mountain, or of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. The “Washington compound,” as Brown calls it, is “distinguished by a grotesque luxury of jeweled, ivoried, and furred elegance; a small army of slaves sees to every need.” This “state within a state,” built on killing and kidnapping, is ultimately no more than a redoubt that is destroyed when the secret shenanigans are exposed and the secluded empire is bombed into ruins even as Braddock Washington,