NPR

Party Like It's 1925 On Public Domain Day (Gatsby And Dalloway Are In)

Every year on January 1, the copyright on thousands of books, songs, films and other creative works expires. Law professor Jennifer Jenkins says 2021 is "a bumper crop."
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka and many more authors and artists have 1925 works entering the public domain on January 1. Above, a first edition of <em>The Great Gatsby</em> at the London International Antiquarian Book Fair in London in 2013.

What a year it was for Anglo-American literature and the arts!

1925 was the year of heralded novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Virginia Woolf, seminal works by Sinclair Lewis, Franz Kafka, Gertrude Stein, Agatha Christie, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Aldous Huxley ... and a banner year for musicians, too. Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, the Gershwins, Duke Ellington and Fats Waller, among hundreds of others, made important recordings. And 1925 marked the release of canonical movies from silent film comedians Buster Keaton

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