Books Entering the Public Domain in 2021

Without a doubt, the headliner of this year’s list is certainly F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age melodrama. Millions of schoolchildren may be able to read about the misfortunes of millionaire Jay Gatsby, socialite Daisy Buchanan, and the East Egg gang on Project Gutenberg, or maybe one of them will make a cool TikTok that gets adapted to a stage play. Who’s to say?

I will wager more people have heard of this well-known novel than have read it. It’s short and challenging, with its stream-of-consciousness narration, but it makes an excellent introduction to Woolf’s works. You also absolutely do not get a Ducks, Newburyport without a Mrs. Dalloway.

This short story collection, Hemingway’s first, can be described in the same way as many of his novels: a catalog of suffering. Themes of grief and loneliness run through these stories, which may or may not have some unifying thread, depending on the theory of their creation to which you subscribe. This may make for good background reading if you’ve read The Paris Wife.

Depending on your familiarity with the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, Alain Locke may or may not be a name you know. But Locke is widely considered the father of that intellectual explosion, and this anthology is a meticulously curated compendium of the Black creativity of that era. Included here are poetry, prose, and essays from writers including W.E.B. du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston.

This one may be of special interest to Old Hollywood film fans. Dreiser’s novel was the source material for 1951’s A Place in the Sun, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift. It also happens to be a true crime novel before such a genre existed, drawing its inspiration from the infamous 1906 murder of Grace Brown by her boyfriend.

Another Christie mystery hits the public domain. This one is the first in her series featuring Scotland Yard’s Superintendent Battle. The plot is relatively standard—murder at a well-to-do estate—but it will be another four years before we see Superintendent Battle again in the public domain. In the meantime, there will be a steady drumbeat of Hercule Poirot novels falling out of copyright.

This is a memoir, and an interesting one for 1925. Sugimoto was, as the title suggests, the daughter of a samurai father, though the dissolution of the samurai class around the time of her birth led to dire financial straits for the family. In this account she details her childhood, as well as her journey to America for an arranged marriage.

This science-driven novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1926, but Lewis notably declined the award. The novel, which chronicles the rise of Martin Arrowsmith through the scientific community, contains significant social commentary on the state of American medicine. The sharpness of that commentary is the product of Lewis’s collaboration with science writer Paul de Kruif.

We have a few years yet before Brave New World hits the public domain, but here’s a dose of Huxley’s satirism for the interim. Broadly, this novel skewers the prevailing pretensions of the time, with a group of social elites gathered in Italian palace, feigning sophistication and fluffing themselves up. It’s the type of gathering that would end in at least one murder in an Agatha Christie novel.

Perhaps you saw the 2006 film adaptation of this novel, or the 1934 version, or the 1957 version. There are differences between those narratives and the original story, but the overall setup is the same: we follow British socialite Kitty Garstin as she marries a man she doesn’t love, cheats on that man, and—through an arduous assignment to a remote Chinese village—comes to change her tune.