Several iconic books will enter the public domain on Thursday, becoming available for anyone who wants to publish or adapt them. Jan. 1 is Public Domain Day in the U.S., and Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain has a list of titles that will be fair game in 2026.
William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, widely considered one of the Nobel Prize winner’s masterworks, will enter the public domain, as will Dashiell Hammett’s noir classic The Maltese Falcon. Agatha Christie’s first novel featuring the character Miss Marple, The Murder at the Vicarage, is set to lose its copyright, alongside Noël Coward’s Private Lives, T.S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday, and Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies.
Also entering the public domain will be John Dos Passos’ The 42nd Parallel—the first book in his U.S.A. trilogy—Edna Ferber’s Cimarron, Dorothy L. Sayers’ Strong Poison, and W. Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale.
Books for young readers set to lose their copyright include The Little Engine That Could, written by Watty Piper and illustrated by Lois Lenski; William H. Elson’s Elson Basic Readers, which introduced children to the characters Dick and Jane; and Carolyn Keene’s first four Nancy Drew books.
“Plot, characters, images, vignettes; all can now be mined for future inspiration,” wrote Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle of Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain. “To tell new stories, we draw from older ones. One work of art inspires another—that is how the public domain feeds creativity. Why care about the public domain? That is one reason why.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
