The two classic comic characters who first appeared in 1929 are among the intellectual properties becoming public domain in the United States on Jan. 1.
Books show American lit at its height
The books becoming public this year read like the syllabus for an American literature seminar.
“The Sound and the Fury,” arguably William Faulkner’s quintessential novel with its modernist stream-of-consciousness style, was a sensation after its publication despite being famously difficult for readers. It uses multiple non-linear narratives to tell the story of a prominent family’s ruin in the author’s native Mississippi, and would help lead to Faulkner’s Nobel Prize.
And Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms” joins his earlier “The Sun Also Rises” in the public domain. The partly autobiographical story of an ambulance driver in Italy during the First World War cemented Hemingway’s status in the American literary canon. It has been frequently adapted for film, TV and radio, which can now be done without permission.
John Steinbeck’s first novel, “A Cup of Gold,” from 1929, will also enter the public domain.
The British novelist Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own,” an extended essay that would become a landmark in feminism from the modernist literary luminary, is also on the list. Her novel “Mrs. Dalloway” is already in the U.S. public domain.
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