Here’s one more reason to look forward to the end of 2022: On Jan. 1, a host of books will enter the public domain, which means they’ll be free for anyone to adapt or publish.
Books published in the United States in 1927 will become part of the public domain in 2023, under the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act. The Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School listed some of the notable titles whose copyrights will expire next year.
Among the best known titles to enter the public domain in 2023 is Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, the classic modernist novel about a family spending their summers on the Isle of Skye. In 2021, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway also had its copyright expire.
Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop is another book open for republication or adaptation next year, along with Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Agatha Christie’s The Big Four.
Ernest Hemingway’s story collection Men Without Women and William Faulkner’s novel Mosquitoes are set to enter the public domain as well. In 2022, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Faulkner’s Soldiers’ Pay both lost their copyrights.
Other books that will become fair game in 2023 include Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, Edith Wharton’s Twilight Sleep, and Countee Cullen’s Copper Sun.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
