The Great Gatsby at the London International Antiquarian Book Fair in London in 2013. Image credit: Oli Scarff
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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 and Harold Lloyd.
The Great Gatsby at the London International Antiquarian Book Fair in London in 2013. Oli Scarff / Getty Images
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 and Harold Lloyd.
As of today, every single one of those works has entered the public domain. That means that copyright has expired, explains Jennifer Jenkins, a law professor at Duke University who directs its Center for the Study of the Public Domain. And all of the works are free for anyone to use, reuse, build upon for anyone without paying a
by Hilary Spurling
This article was first published in the October 14, 2010 issue of
The announcement by the Swedish Academy in November 1938 that Pearl Buck had been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature was met with sarcasm and even derision by many writers and critics. They were not impressed that this was the third choice by the academy of an American writer in a mere eight years the first being Sinclair Lewis in 1930, the second Eugene O’Neill in 1936. Pearl Buck had dedicated her writing life to novels and memoirs about China, and her selection was seen as a sop to public opinion, in a world where Japanese and German war scares were becoming a reality and China was a prime victim.