Read The Great Gatsby in Daily Email Installments
Nick Carraway rents a small house on Long Island next door to a mansion where the parties never stop and the host is never quite seen. Fitzgerald's perfect short novel of money, longing, and the green light at the end of the dock — public domain at last, and three months of daily installments.
One installment a day: 91 days — about three months. Pause, rewind, or stop anytime.
Start reading — freeWhy read The Great Gatsby?
The Great Gatsby is the novel most Americans were assigned and fewest actually finished — read at seventeen, when its subject (what it costs to want one thing your whole life) is invisible. Read as an adult, in daily installments, it is a different book: shorter than you remember, funnier than you remember, and far sadder.
It is also the most perfectly constructed novel in American literature — nine chapters, not a wasted scene, every image doing double work. Fitzgerald cut it to the bone, which makes it ideal for serialization: almost every installment lands on an image you'll carry through the day.
The novel entered the public domain in 2021, and we serialize the carefully typeset Standard Ebooks edition complete with its epigraph, chunked at scene boundaries with a “Previously” recap on every installment.
What an installment looks like
Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,Till she cry “Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,I must have you!”—Thomas Parke d’Invilliers
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgements, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.
Questions
How long does it take to read The Great Gatsby?
About three and a half hours straight through (48,185 words). By email, it's 91 daily installments of 2–3 minutes each — finished in about three months.
I read it in high school. Is it worth rereading?
It's the classic case for rereading. At seventeen it's a book about rich people at parties; at thirty-five it's about the irrecoverable past, and the last page reads like it was written about you. It may be the best return-on-time reread in American fiction.
Isn't Gatsby still under copyright?
Not anymore — the novel entered the US public domain on January 1, 2021. We serialize the Standard Ebooks edition of the original 1925 text.
Is it hard to read?
It's one of the easiest classics there is — modern American prose, short chapters, and a narrator who does the judging for you. The only thing it demands is attention to the sentences, which are the point.
How does it arrive?
One email a day at the hour you pick, with a one-line recap of the previous installment at the top. Free. Unsubscribe or pause anytime.
Pick your delivery hour, confirm your email, and installment 1 of 91 arrives with the next send. Free, and unsubscribe anytime.
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