Newly minted millionaires, corruption, nostalgia ... Fitzgerald’s novel has never felt more relevant. Jane Crowther explores its resonance in popular culture from Taylor Swift songs to her own gender-flipped retellingIt’s now considered a masterpiece, but when The Great Gatsby was published a century ago the response was mixed, with one critic writing: “I don’t even know whether it is fully intelligible to anyone who has not had glimpses of the kind of life it depicts.” Back then, this life – which Fitzgerald had been living – was a gilded world reserved for the rich and well connected. His narrator, Nick Carraway, attends his nouveau riche neighbour’s glittering gatherings in the summer of 1922, a time when many US families were living in poverty.It was only when pocket-sized paperbacks of the book were given to US servicemen during the second world war (courtesy of the nonprofit Council On Books in Wartime) that The Great Gatsby became a hit. Perhaps the young men, far from their ordinary lives and pining for the girls they’d wooed in simpler times, connected with Gatsby (a figure left deliberately obscure by Fitzgerald so that any reader could imprint their own dreams on to him). As the war came to an end, maybe they saw themselves in Nick, the first world war returnee and observer who doesn’t entirely fit into any of the social situations in which he finds himself. Continue reading...