The Great Gatsby Turns 100!

This Thursday is the 100^th anniversary of the publication of “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. To celebrate, we’ve invited 30 reader volunteers to come to the Library on Thursday, April 10th, to read through the entire novel with us. The reading will be livestreamed, but if you’re in the area and would like to watch the reading in person, it takes place in our Thomas Jefferson Building—you can reserve free timed-entry tickets here.

The reading will begin at 10am EST and each of the volunteers will read about one-third of each of the novel’s nine chapters. We estimate that the reading will take 5 hours, ending at 3pm EST.

This isn’t our first Gatsby program at the Library of Congress. In 2014, we featured writer and book critic Maureen Corrigan discussing her book “So We Read On: How ‘The Great Gatsby’ Came To Be and Why It Endures.” She began by saying, “I feel like in a sense I’m coming home, because I spent so many happy days at the Library of Congress researching this book.” Maureen came to the National Book Festival the following year.

Continuing the Festival tradition, we also highlighted “The Great Gatsby” at the 2023 National Book Festival: nonprofit Literature to Life presented a one-man play adapation, performed by Bryce Foley.

Finally, a fun fact: If you visit the Library and look above the entrance to our relatively new Treasures Gallery on the mezzanine floor of the Thomas Jefferson Building, you’ll see eight white circles on the ceiling, known as printers’ marks. Inside each of those circles, an artist painted the logo of an American publisher; the eight publishers depicted on the ceilings were considered the most prestigious American publishers at the time the building opened in 1897. One such publisher, Charles Scribner’s Sons, published “The Great Gatsby” and other now-classic American modernist literature. Now the publisher is known as Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. 

We hope you’ll celebrate the anniversary with us, whether in person on online!