Read The Great Gatsby by email.
Short enough to finish, and better the second time.
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.
Two or three minutes a day, and every installment opens with a line reminding you where you left off.
Three months from now, you will have read Fitzgerald.
91 installments, one an email
- First published
- 1925
- Installments
- 91
- Each installment
- 2–3 min
How long it takes
- Words
- 48,230
- Reading time
- 3 hours 21 minutes
- At 5 minutes a day
- 6 weeks
- At 10 minutes a day
- 3 weeks
- At 20 minutes a day
- 10 days
At 240 words a minute, the average for adult silent reading. Use your own speed
Why 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.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to read The Great Gatsby?
About three and a half hours straight through (48,230 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.
Standard Ebooks edition, public domain. Texts from Standard Ebooks and Project Gutenberg editions. Not affiliated with either.