Whether it’s a jazz age loner looking for love or a boyband star dating an older, wiser woman, fame and its many trapdoors are here for all to see
April 2024
The Great Gatsby review – a literary classic becomes a Broadway dud
F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel makes an underwhelming transfer to the stage in a bombastic yet misfiring new production
March 2024
Rediscovered: the long-lost script that helped The Great Gatsby become a classic
F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel was a flop until a 1926 staging became a Broadway smash
June 2023
Top 10s
Top 10 summer love stories
With holidays, light evenings and heat, it is a season that goes naturally with romance, as authors from F Scott Fitzgerald to Maggie O’Farrell show
February 2023
Top 10s
Top 10 cads in fiction
Dangerously handsome young men carelessly ruining women’s lives are a rarer breed than they were. But their hatefulness still makes compelling reading
November 2022
Top 10s
Top 10 books about tycoons
From rapacious businessmen to political power brokers, this literature extends from biographies of Cornelius Vanderbilt and Tiny Rowland to novels by Scott Fitzgerald and Preti Taneja
August 2022
Dating apps’ promises exceed reality – and yet we wait for the next swipe right
Letters: Vicky Littler and Anthony Weir respond to articles in the Guardian series Swipe right: the decade that changed dating
June 2022
Through its rambling millionaires, The Great Gatsby satirises racist ideology
Letter: In his 1925 novel, F Scott Fitzgerald is not ‘referencing’ white supremacist ideas but attacking them head-on, writes Richard Ellis
February 2022
The Great Gapsby? How modern editions of classics lost the plot
F Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece is the latest title to appear in a cheap modern version after copyright expires
January 2022
Bootleggers, bondage and law-breaking bashes! The scandalous history of the wild party
From Prohibition-busting cocktail parties to all-night raves, illegal gatherings have been at the centre of modern culture for decades. So why do they still have the power to shock?
September 2021
Top 10s
Top 10 novels of the 1930s
From George Orwell to Daphne du Maurier, the books that made a decade span village detectives, Edwardian butlers and Bright Young Things
April 2021
‘Sleaze’ doesn’t capture it: Boris Johnson is utterly careless of everyone but himself
Aditya Chakrabortty
Florence Welch to adapt The Great Gatsby for Broadway musical
March 2021
Lockdown culture
The Great Gatsby review – two-woman show is a cocktail of stage wizardry
Scenery, sounds, light and casting are treated with endless invention in this charmingly low-key take on Fitzgerald’s classic
January 2021
Vampires, Muppets and prequels: The Great Gatsby’s new life out of copyright
Observer book of the week
Bright Star, Green Light by Jonathan Bate review – the parallel lives of a pair of romantics
October 2020
The Great Gatsby review – intimate immersive show offers heady discombobulation
A revitalised, socially distanced version of the F Scott Fitzgerald adaptation keeps the jazz age alive with song, dance and spectacle
July 2020
The Great Gatsby prequel set for release days after copyright expires
Top 10s
Top 10 best-dressed characters in fiction
May 2020
Alaskan school board lifts ban on Gatsby and Catch-22 after protests
The Matanuska-Susitna borough in Palmer restores modern classics by authors including F Scott Fitzgerald and Joseph Heller to curriculum after community action
