Today copyrighted works from 1927 will enter the US public domain. They will be free for all to copy, share, and build upon. These include Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and the final Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, the German science-fiction film Metropolis and Alfred Hitchcock’s first thriller, compositions by Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller, and a novelty song about ice cream.

Jennifer Jenkins of Duke University’s Center for the Public Domain has painstaking researched highlights from the coming year’s entrants, including many works of literature that Travel Between The Pages followers may be interested in reading.

• Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
• Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes
• Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop
• Countee Cullen, Copper Sun
• A. A. Milne, Now We Are Six, illustrations by E. H. Shepard
• Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
• Ernest Hemingway, Men Without Women (collection of short stories)
• William Faulkner, Mosquitoes
• Agatha Christie, The Big Four
• Edith Wharton, Twilight Sleep
• Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of New York (the original 1927 publication)
• Franklin W. Dixon (pseudonym), The Tower Treasure (the first Hardy Boys book)
• Hermann Hesse, Der Steppenwolf (in the original German)
• Franz Kafka, Amerika (in the original German)
• Marcel Proust, Le Temps retrouvé (the final installment of In Search of Lost Time, in the original French)

These are just a handful of the thousands of books entering the public domain in 2023. There is a lot to celebrate: a modernist masterpiece, poetry from the Harlem Renaissance, children’s verses featuring Winnie-the-Pooh and other characters, and early works from Hemingway and Faulkner. Copyright will also expire over Arthur Conan Doyle’s final Sherlock Holmes stories.

You can check out the entire list at the Duke website.