“The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” appeared in Fitzgerald’s second volume of short stories, titled Tales of the Jazz Age (1922). Reviews of this collection were mixed, though many reviewers found it a definite improvement over his first collection, Flappers and Philosophers. In a review in the St. Paul Daily News, Woodward Boyd calls the collection “a better assemblage, on the whole, than Flappers and Philosophers.” Hildegarde Hawthorne of the New York Times Book Review, writes that “There is plenty of variety in the new collection, more than in the Flappers and Philosophers.”

However, many critics found the collection to be somewhat haphazard, featuring many lesser stories thrown in with a few of higher quality. A reviewer from the Times Literary Supplement notes, “none of the diverse elements in his book—fantastic, serious, or farcical—has been really mastered or drawn together.” In agreement is a reviewer in the Baltimore Evening Sun, as quoted by Jackson Bryer in The Critical Reputation of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who writes that the stories “give the impression of being tossed off in rather debonair manner to show how easy it all is.”

“The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” fared poorly with many critics. In her 1989 book, Fitzgerald’s Craft of Short Fiction: The Collected Stories 1920–1935, Alice Hall Petry writes: “So excoriating were the reactions to “Diamond” that one feels only relief that Fitzgerald did not use it as the title of the collection as he had briefly wished.” Some of the critics were less harsh, however. As quoted in F. Scott Fitzgerald in His Own Time: A Miscellany, a 1922 article in the Minneapolis Journal, entitled “The Future of Fitzgerald,” states, “‘The Diamond as Big as the Ritz’ is not perfect, but it is remarkable” and goes on to assert that Fitzgerald’s strength lies in these imaginative types of stories, rather than in realism.

In hindsight, the story seems to occupy a more favorable light. First of all, attacking materialism, the American way of life, was unlikely to draw favorable reactions just a few short years after World War I. In addition, when seen in the context of Fitzgerald’s entire career, “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” stands out as a turning point in the development of a more mature style. James Miller, in his book F. Scott Fitzgerald: His Art and his Technique, explains: “‘May Day’ and ‘The Diamond as Big as the Ritz’ mark important steps in the development of Fitzgerald’s fictional technique . . . he was using experimental techniques, and these experiments . . . were to prove valuable to him in his longer works.”

Whatever the critics’ reactions in 1922, the story remained a favorite of readers in the years following, and it was anthologized in numerous collections of Fitzgerald’s work.