January 5, 2021 | Patton
In 1998, Congress extended the date of copyright expiration for works published between 1923 and 1977 to 95 years. So as of this year, many great works originally published in 1925 are now part of the public domain, accessible to free legal use. Check out some of these 96 yr old titles and find out why they're still on reading lists and influencing popular culture.
Books
Jay Gatsby had once loved beautiful, spoiled Daisy Buchanan, then lost her to a rich boy. Now, mysteriously wealthy, he is ready to risk everything to woo her back.
Offering a fresh perspective on what makes Gatsby great-and utterly unusual-So We Read On takes us into archives, high school classrooms, and even out onto the Long Island Sound to explore the novel's hidden depths, a journey whose revelations include Gatsby's surprising debt to hard-boiled crime fiction, its rocky path to recognition as a "classic," and its profound commentaries on the national themes of race, class, and gender.
Mrs. Dalloway chronicles a June day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway-a day that is taken up with running minor errands in preparation for a party and that is punctuated, toward the end, by the suicide of a young man she has never met. In giving an apparently ordinary day such immense resonance and significance-infusing it with the elemental conflict between death and life-Virginia Woolf triumphantly discovers her distinctive style as a novelist.
In Our Time contains several early Hemingway classics, including the famous Nick Adams stories "Indian Camp," "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife," "The Three Day Blow," and "The Battler," and introduces readers to the hallmarks of the Hemingway style: a lean, tough prose -- enlivened by an car for the colloquial and an eye for the realistic that suggests, through the simplest of statements, a sense of moral value and a clarity of heart.
In Arrowsmith (1925), Lewis portrays the medical education and career of Martin Arrowsmith, a physician who finds his commitment to the ideals of his profession tested by the greed and opportunism he encounters in private practice, public health work, and scientific research. The novel reaches its climax as its hero faces his greatest medical and moral challenges amid a deadly outbreak of plague on a Caribbean island. Arrowsmith was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, which Lewis refused to accept.
Little did Anthony Cade suspect that an errand for a friend would place him at the center of a deadly conspiracy. Drawn into a web of intrigue, he begins to realize that the simple favor has placed him in serious danger. As events unfold, the combined forces of Scotland Yard and the French Sûreté gradually converge on Chimneys, the great country estate that hides an amazing secret. . .
Set in the 1920s, The Painted Veil is the story of the beautiful but love-starved Kitty Fane. When her husband discovers her adulterous affair, he forces her to accompany him to the heart of a cholera epidemic, where she is compelled by her awakening conscience to reassess her life and learn how to love.
Movies
Though he dreams of being a big man on campus, the freshman's careful plans inevitably go hilariously awry, be it on the football field or at the Fall Frolic. But he gets a climactic chance to prove his mettle, and impress the sweet girl he loves, in one of the most famous sports sequences ever filmed. This crowd-pleaser is a gleeful showcase for Lloyd's slapstick brilliance and incandescent charm.
Even after her marriage to well-bred Stephen Dallas ends, irrepressible Stella is determined to give their daughter the life she never had. And when it comes down to her child's happiness versus her own, Stella's sacrifice is truly the epitome of bravery.
In "Go West," a hapless young man, heeding the expansionist call of Horace Greeley, idealistically hops a freight train to meet his destiny. "The Scarecrow" follows the unhealthy competition between roommates vying for the attentions of a young lady. In "The Paleface," Buster helps a Native American tribe defend their land from greedy developers.