On January 1, 2025, thousands of copyrighted literary works from 1929 entered the public domain in the United States. That means that in the U.S., authors can now incorporate these works into their own writing without permission and distribute them freely within the U.S.

Notable literary works from 1929 entering the public domain this year include:

• William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
• Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
• Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
• Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon (as serialized in Black Mask magazine)
• John Steinbeck’s first novel, Cup of Gold 
• Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica
• Oliver La Farge, Laughing Boy: A Navajo Love Story
• Patrick Hamilton, Rope
• Arthur Wesley Wheen’s first English translation of All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
• Agatha Christie, The Seven Dials Mystery
• Robert Graves, Good-bye to All That
• E. B. White and James Thurber, Is Sex Necessary? Or, Why You Feel the Way You Do
• Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (in the original German,  Briefe an einen jungen Dichter)
• Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Morals
• Ellery Queen, The Roman Hat Mystery

These works reveal the rich literary landscape of 1929, including modernist masterpieces, war literature, detective fiction, and feminist theory. Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, published just before the stock market crash, took its title from Shakespeare’s Macbeth—itself a public domain work. The novel’s experimental narrative style influenced generations of writers. Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and the English translation of All Quiet on the Western Front offered powerful reflections on World War I, while Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own became a foundational feminist text.

Beyond traditional literature, 1929 also introduced several iconic characters through magazines and comic strips that will also enter the public domain in the U.S.:

• E. C. Segar’s Popeye the Sailor, who first appeared in “Gobs of Work” from the Thimble Theatre comic strip
• Hergé’s Tintin, who debuted in “Les Aventures de Tintin” from the magazine Le Petit Vingtième

These characters join an impressive roster of recent public domain entrants, including the original Mickey Mouse, Winnie-the-Pooh, and the final iterations of Sherlock Holmes. While more Mickey Mouse content from 1929 becomes available, we welcome the earliest versions of Popeye and Tintin.

It’s worth noting that only the original 1929 incarnations of these characters are entering the public domain this year. For instance, Popeye, who first appeared in 1929, possessed superhuman strength, but his famous spinach-eating power wouldn’t appear until 1932.

These books and characters may still be under copyright elsewhere in the world as copyright terms for older works in other countries generally differ from U.S. terms. If you want to incorporate them in a new work published overseas, you should check the copyright in the relevant country.

These yearly lists remind us that the public domain is not just about preserving our cultural heritage—it’s about enabling its renewal and reinterpretation for new generations. As these works become freely available, they open new possibilities for adaptation, interpretation, and creative transformation.