The Great Gatsby entered the public domain in the United States in 2021. More precisely, its U.S. copyright expired on January 1, 2021, under the Copyright Term Extension Act, which protected works published in 1925 for 95 years. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel was first published on April 10, 1925, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.
The date matters because “public domain” is jurisdiction-specific. The novel became freely usable in the United States, allowing people to copy, adapt, republish, and distribute the original text without permission. Copyright rules in other countries may differ, especially because Fitzgerald died in 1940 and many countries use terms based partly on the author’s lifetime.
A common mix-up is answering 1925, the publication year, rather than 2021, the year copyright protection ended. Another is assuming every edition and adaptation became free simultaneously: later introductions, illustrations, film versions, and new translations can have their own copyrights. The public-domain status applies to the original 1925 literary work in the United States.