Welcome to the Public Domain, 1925!
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| Collage by Duke Law School's Center for the Study of the Public Domain,
shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
License. |
On January 1, 2021, copyrighted works published in 1925 entered the U.S. public domain, opening up a treasure trove of books, movies, and music compositions* for use by anyone without need for permission or a fee.
Perhaps most notable among these works is The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, which can now be adapted, remixed, and built upon by anyone.** Other works of note include the novel Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis, films including Harry Lewis's The Freshman and The Merry Widow, and music by Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, the "Mother of Blues" and subject of the 2020 film Ma Rainey's Black Bottom.
Below is a list of novels and books from the BC Libraries catalogue that have entered the public domain:
Willa Cather, The Professor's House
Agatha Christie, The Secret of Chimneys
John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer
Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Ford Madox Ford, No More Parades
Zane Grey, The Thundering Herd
Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time
DuBose Heyward, Porgy (adapted to the opera Porgy & Bess in 1935)
Aldous Huxley, Those Barren Leaves
Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith
Alain Locke, The New Negro (an anthology collecting works from W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and others)
Anita Loos, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil
Martha Ostenso, Wild Geese
Dorothy Scarborough, On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs
Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans
Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto, A Daughter of the Samurai
H. G. Wells, A Year of Prophesying
H. G. Wells, Christina Alberta’s Father
Edith Wharton, The Mother’s Recompense
Edith Wharton, The Writing of Fiction
William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
A great resource to learn more about the public domain is the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University - check out their article on Public Domain Day 2021, which provided the inspiration for this blog post! Great resources for finding free online copies of works in the public domain include the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, and Google Books.
Happy reading (and watching, and creating)!
* Note that only music compositions from 1925 have entered the public domain this year. Subsequent audio recordings of these compositions may still be under copyright, and audio recordings from 1925 aren't scheduled to enter the public domain until 2026.
** In fact, the novelist Micheal Farris Smith is scheduled to publish his novel Nick, a prequel to The Great Gatsby telling the story of Nick Carraway's life, on Jan. 5, 2021!
*** The original German text has passed into the public domain, not the English translation.
