In the US, these exclusive rights are subject to a time limit, and generally expire 70 years after the author's death or 95 years after publication. In the United States, works published before January 1, 1928, are in the public domain.
What are some of the best works of literature that are in the public domain?
The Iliad
The Odyssey
Aesop's fables
The Analects of Confucius
The Bhagavad-Gita
The Persians, The Suppliant Women, Prometheus Bound, and The Oresteia by Aeschylus
Oedipus, Antigone, Women of Trachis, Sophocles and Ajax by Sophocles
Alcestis, Medea, Hippolytus, Hecuba, and Andromache by Euripides
Electra, Hecuba, Heracles, The Trojan Women, Iphigenia in Tauris, Orestes by Euripides
Metamorphoses by Ovid
The Bible
Mahabharata by Vyasa (attrib.)
Returning To Live in the Country (and other works) by Tao Yuanming
Confessions and The City of God by Augustine of Hippo
Satakatraya (The Three Centuries) by Bhartrihari (attrib.)
Beowulf by “The Beowulf Poet”
The Pillow Book (Japan, c. 1002) by Sei Shonagon
The Book of Kings (Shahnameh) (Persia, c. 1010) by Ferdowsi
The Tale of Genji (Japan, c. 1021) by Murasaki Shikibu
Kathāsaritsāgara (The Ocean of Rivers of Story) by Somadeva
The Rubaiyat by Omar Khayyam
The Song of Roland
Perceval, the Story of the Grail
Njal’s Saga
The Divine Comedy by Dante
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by “the Gawain Poet”
The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde by Chaucer
Le Morte d’Arthur by Thomas Malory
In Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
Utopia by Thomas More
Gargantua and Pantagruel (five novels) by François Rabelais
Journey to the West (Monkey) by Wu Cheng’en
Doctor Faustus and The Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe
Julius Caesar, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, and every other play by William Shakespeare
The Faerie Queen by Edmund Spenser
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Fuenteovejuna (Lost in a Mirror) by Lope de Vega
‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1633) by John Ford
Lycidas, Areopagitica, and Paradise Lost by John Milton
The Misanthrope, Don Juan, The School for Wives, and every other play by Molière
Phaedra by Jean Racine
Fables (12 books) by Jean de La Fontaine
A Thousand and One Nights (The Arabian Nights)
Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
Candide by Voltaire
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne
Dream of the Red Chamber (Story of the Stone) by Cao Xueqin
She Stoops to Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith
The Sorrows of Young Werther, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, Faust, and everything else by Goethe
The School for Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan
Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Persuasion, and everything else by Jane Austen
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Ivanhoe by Walter Scott
Fairy Tales and Stories by Hans Christian Andersen
The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
The Red and the Black by Stendhal
The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
Everything by Edgar Allan Poe
Le Père Goriot, Louis Lambert, Eugénie Grandet, and The Girl with the Golden Eyes by Honoré de Balzac
Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, and everything else by Charles Dickens,
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte-Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, An American Slave by Frederick Douglas
Stories (esp. Bartleby the Scrivener) by Herman Melville
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Children’s and Household Tales (Grimm’s Fairy Tales) by Jacob & Wilhelm Grimm
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)
Fathers and Sons and everything else by Ivan Turgenev
The Turn of the Screw and other stories by Henry James
Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, and Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
A Doll’s House, Peer Gynt, Brand, and everything else by Ibsen
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
War and Peace and Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne
Far from the Madding Crowd, Tess of the D’Ubervilles, and The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy
The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant
The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya, The Lady with the Dog, The Seagull, and every play by Anton Chekhov
Ben-Hur by Lew Wallace
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and everything else by Mark Twain
Every play by August Strindberg
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Hunger by Knut Hamsun
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine and The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells
Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
Most of the works by Kipling
The Call of the Wild by Jack London
The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
Many stories by Franz Kafka
Ulysses, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
The Age of Innocence (1920) by Edith Wharton
A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
Mrs. Dalloway and To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Sun Also Rises (1926) by Ernest Hemingway
In Search of Lost Time (seven novels) by Marcel Proust
Gatsby
I've started working on a project making ebooks from public domain work on the subjects mentioned in the title.
While the Gutenberg project has been great for finding books, and I've had some luck extracting chapters from them that can stand on their own, I wondered if anybody knows of where to find individual philosophy essays in the public domain?
Thanks!