Wishlist: Black Writers in the Public Domain

Let’s face it, the public domain is rather pale. You’ve got your Collinses, and your Dickens, and your Austens, etc, etc. That’s not to say that there is nothing out there in the public domain by Black authors, because there is!

I realize I should have made this list back in February when it was Black History Month. Anyway, no time like the present to celebrate authors of colour in the public domain. I started working on this list before the We Need Diverse Books campaign, so it’s still a timely list. Add a few of these authors to Diversify Your Shelves.

I’ve tried to provide a variety of genres. There are a lot of political writings, lectures, and autobiographies available, but that’s not everyone’s thing. Here I have a list that includes poetry, plays, novels, as well as non-fiction writing. I was also glad to see both men and women represented in the public domain.

This list is heavy on the African-Americans. I tried to find a more diverse collection of writers, but, as much as I appreciate Project Gutenberg, the search function is tricky. I’m not a librarian and my tools are limited. This is by no means a comprehensive list, just a list of books and authors I found interesting and wanted to share.

I hope you find a new to you book or author in this list!

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Harriet E Wilson. Harriet E Wilson was born free in the North, but after her father’s death and abandonment by her mother, she was indentured to a rich family. Her novel Our Nig, although semi-autobiographical, is considered one of the first novels written by an African-American of either gender. It’s available for free on Girlebooks.

Frances Harper. Ms Harper was an abolitionist and  suffragette. Her novels are moral tales of temperance and hard work.  Minnie’s Sacrifice sounds interesting. Minnie is mixed race but raised by Northern white adoptive parents. She finds out about her heritage by accident and later moves to the South.

Phillis Wheatley. Phillis was born in Africa, but enslaved and brought to America (later emancipated). She became famous writing poetry during the American Revolution, including one dedicated to George Washington. Although she continued to write poetry, she fell on hard times when her husband was put in debtors’ prison.

Zora Neale Hurston. I absolutely love Their Eyes Were Watching God, but it’s not it the public domain. Ms Hurston’s plays, however, are, including one titled Poker! I’m going to guess that’s it’s about a game of poker. Zora was a Floridian folklorist and member of the Harlem Renaissance.

Alexandre Dumas. The great French writer and my literary crush. He’s best known for novels like The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. His father, Alex, was the child of a Haitian slave and a ne’er do well nobleman. Alex went on to be a hero of the French Revolution and the inspiration for many of Dumas’s heroes. (I highly recommend the new biography, The Black Count by Tom Reiss, all about Alex.) Georges is the story of a mixed race man on a mission. Georges is handsome, brilliant, and brave. He makes the ladies swoon. He returns to the island of birth to get revenge! It is only available in the public domain in the original French. If you can find it, buy it or borrow it, the English translation by Tina A Kover is very good. Or you can read one of his many, many novels.

W.E.B. Du Bois. The Souls of Black Folk is a history of the African-American people from emancipation to the early 20th century. It’s available in text format as well as on LibriVox. I’ve been listening to it recently. It’s academic but interesting. Du Bois was a historian, sociologist, and co-founder of the NAACP.

Charles W Chesnutt.  Mr Chesnutt was a social and political activist. He was of mixed race and could “pass” though he chose not to. Some of his books deal with passing and miscegenation, including the novel The House Behind the Cedars.

Mary Seacole. Mary Seacole was a nurse of the Crimean War, a contemporary of Florence Nightingale. She wrote of her experiences in her autobiography, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands. Mary was born in Jamaica and had both Scottish and African ancestry. She gained her medical knowledge from her mother and her own experimentation.

Alice Moore-Dunbar Nelson. In her early years, Alice was a teacher who went on to become politically active for both African-American and women’s rights. She wrote a collection of short stories and poems titled, Violets and Other Tales.

Alexander Pushkin. I can’t believe I haven’t read anything by Pushkin yet. Pushkin’s great-grandfather, Abram Petrovich Gannibal, was taken from Africa and given as a “gift” to the Czar. After a military engineering education, Abram would become governor of Reval. Pushkin based his unfinished work Peter the Great’s Negro on his ancestor. Pushkin was both a poet and a novelist. Like so many poets of the time, he had a “live fast, die young” kind of life, dying at 37 from a duel wound. One of his most famous verse novels, Eugene Onegin, is available on Project Gutenberg.

Solomon Northup. Unless you’ve been living under a rock you’ve at least heard of the Oscar winning movie, Twelve Years a Slave. There are a number of X Years a Slave narratives in the public domain. Surprisingly, I couldn’t find this one on Project Gutenberg. You can download it from other sites, including LibriVox. Solomon was born free in the North but cruelly tricked and enslaved for 12 years in the South.

Matthew Alexander Henson. Something quite different! Matthew was hired as Robert Peary’s valet and later became “indispensible” (quote Peary) during the many Arctic expeditions. He wrote about his adventures in A Negro Explorer at the North Pole.

Langston Hughes. An inventor of “jazz poetry” and a member of the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes was also a novelist and playwright (his play written with Zora Neale Hurston can be found on Project Gutenberg). Most of his work isn’t in the public domain yet but some of his poems are available on Poem Hunter.

Paul Laurence Dunbar. Paul Laurence Dunbar was another playwright and poet. He wrote much of his work in a dialect, as well as conventional English. The title of Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is from his poem Sympathy. He was the first husband of Alice Moore (above).  Dunbar wrote a number of short stories and novels as well, including Sport of the Gods. This novel involves a family’s move from the South to the North. A false accusation ruins the family. Readers on Goodreads refer to it as “melancholy.” Fans of Thomas Hardy might enjoy this.

Sources: Wikipedia and Goodreads

Wishlist: A Victorian Sensation!

Sensation novels were the drama TV shows of the Victorian Era. They were published in serial format, usually in "penny dreadfuls" or cheap magazines, and relied on sensationalistic plot elements to keep their readers coming back for more every week. Murder? Check. Greed? Yes. Scandalous love affairs? You know it. In 1863 H. L. Mansel said Sensation novels "preach[ed] to the nerves instead of the judgment." Suffice it to say they were pretty low-brow.

Because Victorian Sensation novels were all about cheap thrills, they can be some of the most fun classics to read--as long as you don't mind chunksters and pot-boilers. Below is a list some of the most famous Sensation novelists of their time. Please tell us what Sensation novels you've enjoyed in the comments!

• The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (1859)--Arguably the first Sensation novel, or at the very least the one that started a craze for Sensational fiction. Collins' combination of realism and romanticism, normally antithetical in literature, captured the Victorian public's imagination.
• East Lynne by Ellen Wood (1861)--A woman leaves her husband and child for an aristocratic luvarh, only to be abandoned by him and bear an illegitimate child.
• The Cloister and the Hearth by Charles Reade (1861)--This is a historical novel set in the 15th century that follows the life of an illustrator and scribe named Gerard. The Sensational aspect comes from Gerard's star-crossed love for his wife, Margaret. This one actually looks pretty good.
• Lady Audley's Secret by ME Braddon (1862)--This is an insanely fun, soapy novel about a woman with a dark past who may be Up To Something. Having read this one, I 100% recommend it; it has a surprisingly modern sensibility to it.

Other authors you might want to try:

• Ouida, aka Marie Louise de la Ramée--Ouida's novels have been described as a hybrid of Victorian Sensation and proto-adventure novels. Jack London cited her as a major influence.
• William Black--Black's works are often compared to that of Anthony Trollope. He was very popular during his lifetime and instrumental in fighting for copyright protection for authors in the US.
• Edmund Yates--Yates was very good friends with Charles Dickens (Dickens' letter about the Ellen Ternan "scandal" was published in Household Words, the newspaper Yates edited). He also wrote stuff.
• Henry Kingsley--Immigrated to Australia from England in the early 1860s and wrote adventure novels set in the bush.

Wishlist: Shit Surrealists Like

Tristan Tzara and Joan Miró, Parler Seul: Poéme. Paris: Maeght Editeur, 1950.

Did you know that the Pope of Surrealism, André Breton, had a day job as a librarian? It's true. And while being very bored at his job, he would read all the old books no one was that interested in (NEVER underestimate a bored librarian). Then, when he found authors he liked, he would tell all his friends about them and be like, "These people are totes surrealist!" Then all the other surrealists would read them and say, "Oui! Bien sûr! Jeeze, André, enough with the books already," etc. (actually, they wouldn't say that, because the whole lot of them were raging bibliophiles, one of the many reasons why we love), and the authors would be posthumously inducted into surrealism. Also occasionally posthumously excommunicated.

What did surrealists like? They loved the symbolist poets, philosophy, psychology, alchemy, and anything weird and wonderful. Below is an incomplete list of authors I was able to find online. Note that for some of these authors, only the original French is available in the public domain.


The Symbolists:

• Isidore Ducasse, aka Comte de Lautréamont, is most known for Les Chants de Maldoror, a poem about pain and suffering, whose main character is unrelentingly evil. So, you know, cheery. The first surrealist to discover Ducasse was Phillippe Soupault, who found a copy of Les Chants completely by accident, mis-shelved in a used Parisian bookshop. Surrealists LOVE chance finds like this. Breton and Louis Aragon searched out the only surviving copy of Ducasse's Poésies in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and subsequently republished them in their magazine. What the surrealists loved most about Ducasse was how he liked to compare and draw meaning from the seeming randomness of modern life. He's also a romantic figure, having died at the age of 25--reportedly, killed by Napolean III's secret police. [Les Chants at Project Gutenberg (French)]
• Arthur Rimbaud felt that poetry should strive 'to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the senses.' This naturally appealed to the surrealist writers, who constantly questioned what the senses told us about the "real" world. A Season In Hell and Illuminations are probably his most famous works, but they pale in comparison to the story of his life, which included a torrid affair with fellow poet Paul Verlaine, ending in attempted murder. At 21, Rimbaud declared his poetry a failure and decided to become an adventurer instead. This ended badly. [Project Gutenberg (French)|Illuminations (English)]
• Raymond Roussel wrote poetry in complicated puns and word games that appealed to the surrealists' sense of the ridiculous. Marcel Duchamp, who gave up art to play chess (supposedly), was a big fan, and often employed similar puns in his own work (for example, L.H.O.O.Q., which read aloud in French sounds like "she has a hot ass"... or something). [Project Gutenberg (French)|New Impressions of Africa (English)]
• Alfred Jarry is another interesting character, a prankster who specialized in absurdest plays, the most famous of which is Ubu Roi, with the opening line "Merde!" When he wasn't painting himself green and riding around on his bicycle extolling the virtues of absinthe, he was inventing pataphysics, a pseudoscience that makes fun of metaphysics and is defined as "the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments." I have no idea what that means, by the way, but since it's a science dedicated to not understanding anything, that's probably the point. [Project Gutenberg (French)]

l'Autres:

• The Marquis de Sade was admired for his open beliefs about love and sexuality. [Project Gutenberg (French)]
• Edgar Allan Poe was called by Breton "surrealist in adventure." His stories are filled with strange happenings, signs of the unconscious, and people with neuroses. [Project Gutenberg (English)]
• Pierre Reverdy was a contemporary of the surrealists, whom they called 'our immediate elder, the exemplary poet.' His work is characterized by a feeling of existential loneliness (of course! He's French). He also had a torrid affair with Coco Chanel. Rawr. [8 poems by Reverdy at Milk Mag (English)]

The Philosophers:

• Paracelsus was a German alchemist from the 16th century who was interested in how the four elements could be transformative. He is also the first known person to mention the unconscious, and is rumored to be the real-life inspiration behind the identity of Christian Rosenkreutz, a mythical alchemist. [Scans of original manuscripts]
• Giordano Bruno was a 16th century astrologer who was also interested in hermetic studies. He was burned at the stake for defying the Catholic church, which would be enough to get the surrealists' vote alone; but he also pioneered the idea of the universe consisting of multiple worlds full of infinite possibilities--a pre-quantum physicist. [Works by Bruno at the Warburg Library]
• Eliphas Lévi was a 19th century French magician who incorporated tarot cards into his rituals. [Project Gutenberg (French)|ebooks online (French and English)]

The Psychologists:

• Freud--of course, Freud! The surrealists loved Freud and the concept of the unconscious, as well as Freud's theories on sexuality and oedipal complexes. Not to mention that Freud had the insight to recognize poets as the true "discoverers" of the unconscious. Surprisingly, there are a ton of Freud's writings available in the public domain. [Project Gutenberg (English)]
• Pierre Janet was kind of the anti-Freud. Breton was inspired by him during a brief stint as a med student, but Janet himself wasn't down with the kids those days, yo. Those crazy surrealists! He's the one who coined the terms disassociation and subconscious, not Freud, and some people credit him as the true source of psychotherapy practice. [works by Pierre Janet online (French)]

Wishlist: Wa-oooo-Werewolves!

Look out! Werewolves are back, y'all! Yes, there's the fuzzy guy who always loses his shirt in the Twilight saga, but there is also the down and dirty Jake Marlow from The Last Werewolf. Plus, a plethora of paranormal characters both goodies and baddies.

Of course, ye olde werewolf has been around for ages. I recently read Anne Rice's latest, The Wolf Gift, in it she references a bunch of wolf related novels. You may or may not have heard of these.

*The Wolf Leader by Alexandre Dumas. I've actually read this one. A man sells his soul for the vengeful powers of a wolf. This one is based on the folklore tale Dumas heard from a family friend when he was a boy. Project Gutenberg doesn't have it but I did find it online for free. It's not the easiest read because of the typos.

*The Man-Wolf by Erckmann-Chartrain  (also The Count of Nideck adapted by Ralph Browning Fiske). A short story of a Black Forest monster, The Man-Wolf was created by the French duo Erckmann- Chartrain. The link goes to an English version of the story. I'm not sure about the adaption by Friske. I can't find much about it, other than it's illustrated.

*Wagner the Wehrwolf by George W M Reynolds. This one sounds really terrible! It's a penny dreadful and even the description on Goodreads is flowery. Wagner gives the last year of his life to a guy named John Faust for wealth and youth. Of course, he has to become a werewolf to get it. Should be interesting.

*Vandover and the Brute by Frank Norris. As far as I can tell, there are no werewolves in this one. Darnit. Vandover is a young artist in San Francisco who does a lot of drugs in seedy bars. This bad side of his personality is referred to as 'a wolf.' Boo.

Other werewolf stories I ran across while researching this post that you'd might like:

*Were-wolf by Clemence Housman. This one involves a lady werewolf. Housman was a suffragette. HP Lovecraft had this to say, "attains a high degree of gruesome tension and achieves to some extent the atmosphere of authentic folklore." This could be interesting.

*The Werewolf by Eugene Field. This is actually a short story within a collection of Eugene Field's work called Second Book of Tales linked here. Field was a children's author.

*The Book of Were-wolves by Sabine Baring-Gould. If you really want to know about the myths and legends of the werewolf, this vicar (yes, vicar) and historian who taught classes with a bat on his shoulder wrote quite the tome on them. Not on Project Gutenberg but scanned onto Sacred Texts (a website). I think I'll skip this one.

Have you read any of these? Are they worth reading? 

Wishlist: Characters Based On Vidocq

Portrait of Eugène François Vidocq by Achille Devéria

Eugène François Vidocq's life was one that defined the term stranger than fiction. He was a complete troublemaker, stealing and going in and out of prisons from an early age. He was an expert fighter and duelist, a skill he employed in numerous fights, mostly over the women he seduced. He traveled with troupes of players, puppeteers, and gypsies at various times in his life, served in the army, and worked in prison gangs. But what he's most well-known for is his role as the world's first private detective.

To get out of prison, Vidocq agreed to spy on criminals for the French police. When he got out, he organized his own plainclothes police unit called the Brigade de Sûreté, the first undercover police force. Basically Vidocq hired criminals to spy on other criminals, a venture that was wildly successful. Under a writ of Napoleon, the brigade became a state police unit called the Sûreté Nationale--which still exists today--with Vidocq as its first director.

Vidocq trained his agents in fighting, including martial arts; the use of disguises, which he himself often employed; profiling the personalities and habits of criminals; and applying the scientific method to cases. It was said he had a photographic memory and could recall the face of every criminal he ever came across. Not expecting his agents to have the same skill, however, he set up the first police record system that contained information on a criminal's physical description, modus operandi, handwriting samples, etc. He was also the first person to employ ballistics in an investigation. He consulted directly in the establishment of Scotland Yard, and the FBI later adapted many of his methods.

After a regime change in France that temporarily disbanded the Sûreté, Vidocq opened a paper company, hoping to capitalize on a new chemical process he invented to prevent check fraud. There he employed mostly criminals and indigents. The business went under, and Vidocq's next venture was to open le bureau des renseignements, the first private detective agency. However, in order to catch criminals, Vidocq himself often engaged in criminal activity, which frequently landed him in prison. Fortunately for Vidocq, he now had powerful friends who influenced the court to get most of the cases against him either thrown out or overturned.

With a history like that (not to mention his friendship with several of France's greatest writers, including Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Alexandre Dumas, all of whom plumbed his life story for their own work), is it any wonder that his biography became fodder for numerous novels? Even if you've never heard of Eugène François Vidocq, chances are you're familiar with at least one of his literary incarnations:

• The Memoirs of Vidocq (1828)--After Vidocq wrote his memoirs, his writer friends Balzac, Hugo, and Dumas, told him it was too short and needed work. The memoirs were eventually published with considerable reworking by a ghostwriter. One could say they're the books that started it all. [Project Gutenberg]
  
• Le Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac (1835)--Balzac modeled many characters after Vidocq, most obviously Vautrin, which was Vidocq's nickname as a teenager. [Project Gutenberg|Librivox]
• The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe (1841)--In what is considered the first mystery, Poe's detective, C. Auguste Dupin, uses logic and abductive reasoning to solve crimes. Poe is known to have read stories of the life of Vidocq in Burton's Gentleman Magazine, and Dupin employs the same unique techniques Vidocq espoused. [Project Gutenberg|Librivox]
• The Mysteries of Paris by Eugène Sue (1842)--Despite the title, this is a French version of the Victorian sensational novel, and has nothing to do with the mystery genre per se. However, the main character of Rodolphe displays similar traits to that of Vidocq, being a good fighter, yet sympathetic and kind to the poor. [Project Gutenberg|Librivox]
• Moby Dick by Herman Melville (1851)--Vidocq is mentioned admirably here, supposedly. He's also mentioned in White Jacket. [Project Gutenberg|Librivox]
• Les Mohicans de Paris by Alexandre Dumas (1854)--Here the character of Monsieur Jackal was inspired by Vidocq. [available at Internet Archive]
• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (1860)--The fugitive in this novel was inspired by Vidocq's real-life exploits. [Project Gutenberg|Librivox]
• Les Misérables by Victor Hugo (1862)--Hugo and Vidocq were close friends, and BOTH of the main characters in Les Mis--Jean Valjean and Police Inspector Javert--were modeled after after different roles Vidocq took on during the course of his life. Not only characters, but whole scenes and chapters in Les Mis mirror Vidocq's experiences, particularly in prison. [Project Gutenberg|Librivox]
• Monsieur Lecoq by Emile Gaboriau (1868)--Gaboriau's detective is the head of the Sûreté, just as Vidocq himself was, and employs similar methods of detection based on science and logic. [Project Gutenberg|Librivox]

Do you know of anyone else who inspired so many different characters?

Wishlist: The First Mysteries

1876 illustration from Murder In the Rue Morgue

Trying to figure out what constitutes the earliest mystery novel can be like trying to dig a hole in the sand: no matter how deeply you go, you never seem to reach the bottom. Part of the problem is, what does one really mean by "mystery novel"? Detective fiction, crime fiction, a novel in which a mystery is solved? Depending on how you define the genre, early mysteries might include Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, "The Three Apples" from Arabian Nights, or Chinese gong an stories.

However, mystery novels as most of us understand them today more or less started in the 19th century. Some very early examples:

• Mademoiselle de Scuderi by ETA Hoffmann (1819)--A poetess discovers who is murdering people and stealing their jewelry in this Louis XIV-era novella. However, Mlle Scuderi doesn't exactly solve the murders, so whether or not this can be really be called a detective novel is debatable. [available to read online here]
  
• The Rector of Veilbye by Steen Steensen Blicher (1829)--A Danish novella based on a true murder case. [can be found in this mystery compendium at Project Gutenberg|Librivox]
  
• Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe (1841)--This is usually considered THE very first detective mystery. Poe established the formula for the mystery genre, as well as created a memorable detective, C. Auguste Dupin (who was based on Eugène François Vidocq, real-life director of the Sûreté Nationale, the founder of the first private detective agency, and the father of modern criminology as well as the French police). Dupin also appeared in The Mystery of Marie Rogêt and The Purloined Letter. However, since these stories are short, can they really be called "novels"? [Project Gutenberg|Librivox]
  
• Notting Hill Mystery by Charles Felix (1862)--This serialized mystery appears to be the first British detective novel. It centers around an insurance investigator who believes a baron killed his wife. Fun fact: Daphne du Maurier's grandfather illustrated the story. [available to read in original serialized format at Internet Archive]
  
• Monsieur Lecoq by Emile Gaboriau (1868)--This is often cited as the first French mystery novel, with a detective who was also based on Vidocq. Like his real-life counterpart, Lecoq is adept at disguises and applies the scientific method in unraveling crimes. [Project Gutenberg|Librivox]
  
• The Woman in White (1858) and The Moonstone (1868) by Wilkie Collins--Although more properly classified as a sensational novel, in my opinion, The Woman in White has a central mystery and is usually cited as one of the first British mysteries. The Moonstone is more of a proper mystery and contains plot elements like red herrings, a locked room, false suspects, and a professional investigator. TS Eliot called it, "the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels," and Dorothy L. Sayers called it, "probably the very finest detective story ever written." [Project Gutenberg|Librivox]
  
• The Leavenworth Case by Anna Katherine Green (1878)--As far as I've been able to find, this is the first detective novel by a female writer. The detective, a Mr. Gryce, attempts to figure out who shot the wealthy Mr. Leavenworth in the back of the head. [Project Gutenberg|GirleBooks|Librivox]
  

Have you read any of these early mystery novels? What did you think of them?