We regularly feature titles from the HathiTrust collection of 18+ million items and share them on our homepage. Some of the featured titles are recommended by researchers and readers like you, while others take inspiration from timely events, or highlight lesser-known or underrepresented and historically-marginalized voices preserved in the collection.
Thank you to our contributing member libraries without whom there would be no collection, and to all our member libraries whose support enables the preservation of and access to the HathiTrust collection to users around the world.
A year in U.S. history known more for its failings, 1929 also brought forth literary achievements that have now entered the public domain. Among them are 76,000 titles now available for U.S. readers in the HathiTrust Digital Library — with some open globally — as well as 60,380 titles now open worldwide. Read HathiTrust’s press release on this year’s Public Domain Day collections.
For the selection of our featured 1929 titles, we are indebted to the research of John Mark Ockerbloom and his blog, Everybody’s Libraries, where he publishes his annual Public Domain Day Countdown. For more on the public domain all year round, see the Duke University Law School’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, as well as The Public Domain Review.
Featured Homepage Titles
Gods’ Man, A Novel in Woodcuts
By Lynd Ward
Contributed by University of California
The first of Ward’s many wordless novels reflects the bleak, post-war milieu of America’s urban, rural, and psychological spaces.
A Farewell to Arms
by Ernest Hemingway
Contributed by University of California
Hemingway’s fictional account of wartime Italy was first serialized in Scribner’s Magazine in the May 1929 to October 1929 issues.
Hitty, Her First Hundred Years
By Rachel Field, illustrated by Dorothy Lathrop
Contributed by Penn State University
This novel, narrated from the perspective of a small wooden doll, won the Newberry Award for Children’s Literature in 1930. The illustrations here are in their original black and white, though many subsequent reprintings added color.
Vidas cruzadas
By Jacinto Benavente
Contributed by University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
Most of Benavente’s 172 published works are plays, including this one. The major Spanish dramatist won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1922.