Every year older movies and books that were written decades ago get released into the public domain. That means as an artist you can use the source material for your own creative endeavors without having to get permission to do so. You don’t have to pay any $$money to anyone or pay any licensing fees. It is part of the public domain and is yours to use for whatever your little heart wants to use it for.

As of 2025 all books, movies and art from the 1920s are in the public domain. 2026 marks entries from 1930 and sound recordings from 1925. There is somehow a 95-year window for movies, books, and art and a 100 year window for sound recordings. But before getting the gist on what newer materials are the sandbox for your creativity, here is a selection of what you can use, redistribute and just enjoy from

The 1920’s

I decided to break up the article because it was a little long and messy
So the list of movies, music and art in the 1920’s can be found here.

1920’s Public Domain Days -Movies, Music And Art |
Public Domain Literature Before The 19th Century |
Catholic Bard’s Guide to Public Domain Literature 
The Write People In 1889 
1928 Is Public Domain In 2024 |
1929 Is Public Domain In 2025 
1930 Is Public Domain In 2026

Descriptions Below Are Taken from the Creative Commons Source Wikipedia.

Under the Copyright Term Extension Act  of 1998 works made in 1923 or afterwards that were still protected by copyright in 1998 would not enter the public domain until January 1, 2019, or later.

This includes the years

Before the 1920’s

And these books from about a century ago.

This is still a work in progress and will be updated with corrections, additions and other so-called changes for improvement and completeness

Literature

Books

For a Complete List of Books Please Consult

Catholic Bard’s Guide To Public Domain Literature
A List Of Books Available In The Public Domain

Children’s Books

Joyce Lankester Brisley

Milly-Molly-Mandy

Milly-Molly-Mandy Stories (1928)
Milly-Molly-Mandy Again (1929)

 Walter R. Brooks 

Freddy the Pig

 1. Freddy Goes to Florida,  (To and Again)(1927)
2. Freddy Goes to the North Pole (More To and Again) (1930)

Thornton W. Burgess 

Old Mother West Wind (1910) First Children’s Book

Partial Bibliography

• The Burgess Animal Book for Children (1920)
• The Adventures of Lightfoot the Deer (1921)
• Whitefoot the Wood Mouse (1922)
• Buster Bear’s Twins (1923)
• Billy Mink (1924)
• Little Joe Otter  (1925)

• “Jerry Muskrat at Home”  (1926)
• Longlegs the Heron (1927)
• Bobby Coon Has a Good Time (1928)
• The Burgess Seashore Book for Children (1929)

• Betty Bear’s Lesson (1930)

Richmal Crompton

William Brown books
   1. Just William (1922)
   2. More William (1922)
   3. William Again (1923)
   4. William The Fourth (1924)

   5. Still William (1925)
   6. William The Conqueror (1926)
   7. William The Outlaw (1927)
   8. William In Trouble (1927)
   9. William The Good (1928)

   10. William (1929)
   11. William The Bad (1930)
   12. William’s Happy Days (1930)

Elinor Brent-Dyer

Chalet School
   1. The School At the Chalet (1925)
   2. Jo of the Chalet School (1926)
   3. The Princess of the Chalet School (1927)

   4. The Head Girl of the Chalet School (1928)
   5. The Rivals of the Chalet School (1929)
   6. Eustacia Goes to the Chalet School (1930)

Johnny Gruelle 

Written and illustrated by Gruelle

• Raggedy Ann Stories (1918)

• Friendly Fairies (1919)
• Little Sunny Stories (1919)
• Raggedy Andy Stories (1920)
• The Little Brown Bear (1920)
• Orphant Annie Story Book (1921)
• Eddie Elephant (1921)
• Johnny Mouse and the Wishing Stick (1922),
• The Magical Land of Noom (1922)

• Raggedy Ann and Andy and the Camel with the Wrinkled Knees (1924)
• Raggedy Andy’s Number Book (1924)
• Raggedy Ann’s Wishing Pebble (1925)
• Raggedy Ann’s Alphabet Book (1925)
• Beloved Belindy (1926)
• The Paper Dragon: A Raggedy Ann Adventure (1926)

• Wooden Willie (1927)
• Raggedy Ann’s Magical Wishes (1928)
• Marcella: A Raggedy Ann Story (1929)

• The Cheery Scarecrow (1929)
• Raggedy Ann in the Deep Deep Woods (1930)
• Raggedy Ann’s Sunny Songs (1930), words and illustrations by Johnny Gruelle, music by Will Woodin

Hugh John Lofting 

(January 14, 1886 –  September 26,  1947)

Doctor Dolittle
   1. The Story of Doctor Dolittle (1920)

   2. The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle (1922)
   3. Doctor Dolittle’s Post Office (1923)
   4. Doctor Dolittle’s Circus (1924)
   5. Doctor Dolittle’s Zoo (1925)
   6. Doctor Dolittle’s Caravan (1926)
   7. Doctor Dolittle’s Garden (1927)
8. Doctor Dolittle in the Moon (1928)

The Twilight of Magic (1930)

A. A. Milne

( January 18, 1882 –  January 31, 1956)

Winnie-the-Pooh
   1. When We Were Very Young (1924)
   2. Winnie-the-Pooh (1926)
   3. Now We Are Six (1927)
4 The House at Pooh Corner (1928)

  If I May (1920)
   The Red House Mystery (1922)
   A Gallery of Children (1925)

Lucy Maud Montgomery 

# 1 Anne of Green Gables (1908)

Further Chronicles of Avonlea (1920)

Anne of Green Gables # 8. Rilla of Ingleside (1921)

Albert Payson Terhune

Sunnybank
   1. Lad: A Dog (1919)
   2. Bruce (1920)
   3. Buff (1921)
   4. His Dog (1922)
   5. Further Adventures of Lad (1922)
aka Dog Stories Every Child Should Know

   6. A Book of Famous Dogs (1922)
aka Famous Dog Stories Every Child Should Know
   7. Treve (1924)
   8. The Heart Of A Dog (1921)
   9. Wolf (1924)
   10. Treasure (1926)
aka The Faith of a Collie
   11. My Friend the Dog (1922)
   12. Gray Dawn (1927)
   13. The Luck of the Laird (1926)
aka A Highland Collie
   14. Lad of Sunnybank (1929)

Ruth Plumly Thompson

 (July  27, 1891 –April 6, 1976)

The Princess of Cozytown (1922) (illustrated by Janet Laura Scott)
The Curious Cruise of Captain Santa (1926)

14. Glinda of Oz (1920) L. Frank Baum

It is the last book of the original Oz series, which, following Baum’s death.

  15. The Royal Book of Oz (1921)
   16. Kabumpo in Oz (1922)
   17. The Cowardly Lion of Oz (1923)
   18. Grampa in Oz (1924)
   19. The Lost King of Oz (1925)
   20. The Hungry Tiger of Oz (1926)
   21. The Gnome King of Oz (1927)
22. The Giant Horse of Oz (1928)
   23. Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz (1929)
   24. The Yellow Knight of Oz (1930)

29. The Wishing Horse of Oz (1935)
   30. Captain Salt in Oz (1936)
   31. Handy Mandy in Oz (1937)
   32. The Silver Princess in Oz (1938)
   33. Ozoplaning With the Wizard of Oz (1939)

Other Oz Books

The Magical Mimics in Oz (1946) by Jack Snow
The Shaggy Man of Oz (1949) by Jack Snow

Bobbsey Twins

Laura Lee Hope

 1. The Bobbsey Twins (1904)
aka The Bobbsey Twins of Lakeport

13. The Bobbsey Twins in the Great West (1920)
aka Visit to the Great West
   14. The Bobbsey Twins At Cedar Camp (1921)
aka The Cedar Camp Mystery
   15. The Bobbsey Twins At the County Fair (1922)
aka The County Fair Mystery
   16. The Bobbsey Twins Camping Out (1923)

   17. The Bobbsey Twins and Baby May (1924)
aka Adventures With Baby May
   18. The Bobbsey Twins Keeping House (1925)
aka The Play House Secret
   19. The Bobbsey Twins at Cloverbank (1926)
aka The Four-Leaf Clover Mystery
   20. The Bobbsey Twins at Cherry Corners (1927)
aka The Mystery at Cherry Corners
   21. The Bobbsey Twins and their Schoolmates (1928)
   22. The Bobbsey Twins Treasure Hunting (1929)

23. The Bobbsey Twins at Spruce Lake (1930)

Other Classic Children’s Books

The Dark Frigate (1923) by Charles Boardman Hawes –Newbery Medal  Winner

Gertrude Chandler Warner  – The Boxcar Children (1924)

Peter Pocket: A Little Boy of the Cumberland Mountains (1927) by May Justus 

Elsa Beskow – Around the Year (1927)

Carl Sandburg. (January 6, 1878 – July 22, 1967)

• Rootabaga Stories (1922)
• Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years (1926).
• The American Songbag (1927)

World of Pure Imagination

Padraic Colum
(December 8, 1881 –January 11, 1972)

•  The Boy Apprenticed to an Enchanter (1920)
• (1920) The Children Of Odin (1920)Nordic Gods and Heroes
• The Boy Apprenticed to an Enchanter (1920)
• The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles, (1921) Newbery Medal  Honor
• The Six Who Were Left in a Shoe (Children’s Story)(1923)
•   Castle Conquer (1923)
• The Island of the Mighty: Being the Hero Stories of Celtic Britain Retold from the Mabinogion,(1924)
•  At the gateways of the day (1924) (Tales and legends of Hawaii) (1924)
• The Peep-Show Man (1924)
• The Bright Islands (Tales and legends of Hawaii V2)(1925)
• The Voyagers: Being Legends and Romances of Atlantic Discovery Newbery Medal  Honor
• Balloon (Play)(1929)
• The Girl who Sat by the Ashes (1929)

The Story of Opal (1920) by Opal Whiteley

The Story of Mankind (1921) It won the Newbery Medal for an outstanding contribution to children’s literature.

Margery Williams – The Velveteen Rabbit or How Toys Become Real (1922)

• Laurence Housman – Moonshine & Clover (1922) Clemence Housman as illustrator
• Felix Salten – Bambi, A Life in the Woods  (1923) (Bambi. Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde)
• Anne Parrish – The Dream Coach (1924) Newbery Medal  Honor
• Arthur Bowie Chrisman– Shen of the Sea (1925) Newbery Medal  Winner
• Ernest La Prade  –Alice in Orchestralia  (1925)
• Palmer Cox – The Brownies in Fairyland (lyrics1925)
• Will James – Smoky the Cowhorse (1926) Newbery Medal  Honor
• Herminie Templeton Kavanagh – The Ashes of Old Wishes & Other Darby O’Gill Tales (1926)
• John Masefield  The Midnight Folk (1927)
• Edward Wyke Smith – The Marvellous Land of Snergs (proto-Hobbits) (1927)

• Wanda Gág – Millions of Cats (1928) Newbery Medal  Honor
• Eric P. Kelly – The Trumpeter of Krakow (1929) Newbery Medal  Winner
• Rachel Field – Hitty, Her First Hundred Years (1929) Newbery Medal  Winner

• Erich Kästner – Emil and the Detectives (Emil und die Detektive) (1929)
• Watty Piper – The Little Engine That Could (1930) 

Classic Mystery Books

Margery Allingham
Albert Campion.

# 1 The Crime at Black Dudley (1929)
# 2 Mystery Mile (1930)

Anthony Berkeley

Roger Sheringham

1 The Layton Court Mystery (1925)
2 The Wychford Poisoning Case (1926)
3 Roger Sheringham and the Vane Mystery (1927)
aka The Mystery At Lovers’ Cave

4 The Silk Stocking Murders (1928)
5 The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929)
The Second Shot (1930)

Leslie Charteris

The Saint (Simon Templar)

Meet the Tiger (1928)

Enter the Saint (1930)
The Last Hero (1930)
Knight Templar (1930)

Dame Agatha  Christie

( September  15, 1890 – 12 January 12,1976)

  Hercule Poirot
   1. The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920)
   2. The Murder on the Links (1923)
   3. Poirot Investigates (1924)
   4. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)
5. The Big Four (1927)
  6. The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928)
   7. Black Coffee (1930)

Tommy and Tuppence
   1. The Secret Adversary (1922)
2. Partners in Crime (1929)

Superintendent Battle
   1. The Secret of Chimneys (1925)
2. The Seven Dials Mystery (1929)

Miss Marple
   The Tuesday Night Club (1927)

1. The Murder at the Vicarage (1930)

Quin and Satterthwaite
   The Mysterious Mr Quin (1930)

Giant’s Bread (1930)
(as by Mary Westmacott)

Earl Derr
Charlie Chan 

The House Without a Key (1925)
The Chinese Parrot (1926)
Behind That Curtain (1928)

The Black Camel (1929)
Charlie Chan Carries On (1930)

Keeper of the Keys (1932) Last One not in PD

S S van Dine
Philo Vance Murder Cases

Philo Vance Murder Cases
   1. The Benson Murder Case (1926)
   2. The Canary Murder Case (1927)
   3. The Greene Murder Case (1928)

   4. The Bishop Murder Case (1928)
   5. The Scarab Murder Case (1930)

Moray Dalton
Hugh Collier

One By One They Disappeared (1929)

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

 (May 22, 1859 – July 7, 1930)

Professor Challenger

The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes(1927)
Contains 12 stories published 1921–1927.

Dashiell Hammett
(May 27, 1894 – January 10, 1961)

• “The Parthian Shot” The Smart Set, October 1922 Collected Stories: Volume 1: 1922–1924 (2025)
• The guttingog Couffignal / Dashiell Hammett 1925 found in The Mystery Hall of Fame
• Red Harvest. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1929.
• The Dain Curse. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1929.
• The Maltese Falcon. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1930.

Hardy Boys

  1. The Tower Treasure (1927)
   2. The House on the Cliff (1927)
   3. The Secret of the Old Mill (1927)
4. The Missing Chums (1928)
   5. Hunting for Hidden Gold (1928)

6. The Shore Road Mystery (1928)
   7. The Secret of the Caves (1929)
   8. The Mystery of Cabin Island (1929)
   9. Great Airport Mystery (1930)

Frances Noyes Hart
(August 1890 – October 25, 1943)
The Bellamy Trial (1927)

Sydney Horler

Dr. Paul Vivanti
   1. The Mystery of No. 1 (1925)
aka The Order of the Octopus
   2. Vivanti (1927)
   3. The Worst Man in the World (1929)

Ellery Queen 

# 1 The Roman Hat Mystery (1929)

# 2 The French Powder Mystery (1930)

Talbot Mundy

Jimgrim
   Jimgrim and the Devil At Ludd (1922)
   Jimgrim and the Lost Trooper (1922)
   Jimgrim and the Seventeen Thieves of El-Kalil (1922)

   The Nine Unknown (1923)
   The Devil’s Guard (1926)     aka Ramsden
   The Hundred Days (1930)
   The Marriage of Meldrun Strange (1930)
   The Woman Ayisha (1930)

Dorothy L . Sayers

 ( June 13, 1893 –   December 17, 1957)

Peter Wimsey
   1. Whose Body? (1923)
   2. Clouds of Witness (1926)
   3. Unnatural Death (1927)
   4. Lord Peter Views the Body (1928)

   5. The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928)
   6. Strong Poison (1930)
The Documents in the Case (1930)

Russell Thorndike
(February 6, 1885 –November 7, 1972)

The Slype (1927)

Patricia Wentworth 

Miss Silver

 1 Grey Mask (1928)

Edgar Wallace
(April 1, 1875 –February 10, 1932)

Four Just Men
1. The Four Just Men (1905)
2. The Council of Justice (1908)
3. The Just Men of Cordova (1917)
4. Again the Three Just Men (1921) aka The Law of the Four Just Men
5. The Three Just Men (1929)

Elk
The Fellowship of the Frog (1925)
The Joker (1926)
aka The Colossus
The Twister (1928)
White Face (1931)

Classic Adventure and Westerns

Emerson Hough
The Covered Wagon (1922)

Johnston McCulley

1. The Curse of Capistrano, All-Story Weekly Vol. 100 No. 2 – Vol. 101 No. 2, August 9 1919 – September 6 1919, serial segment – novella The Curse of Capistrano published by Grosset & Dunlap in 1919

2. The Further Adventures of Zorro, Argosy Vol. 142 No. 4 – Vol. 143 No. 3, May 6 1922 – June 10 1922, serial segment – novella reissued by Grosset & Dunlap as The Mark of Zorro in 1924

Zane Grey
(January 31, 1872 – October 23, 1939)

   The Man of the Forest (1920)
   The Call of the Canyon (1921)
   The Mysterious Rider (1921)
   Tonto Basin (1921)
   The Day of the Beast (1922)
   To the Last Man (1922)
   Wanderer of the Wasteland (1923)
   Roping Lions in the Grand Canyon (1924)

   The Thundering Herd (1925)
   The Vanishing American (1925)
   Under the Tonto Rim (1926)
   Don: Story of a Lion Dog (1928)
   Wild Horse Mesa (1928)
   Fighting Caravans (1929)
   The Shepherd of Guadaloupe (1930)

Forlorn River
   1. Forlorn River (1927)
   2. Nevada (1928)

Clarence E. Mulford

From Wikipedia: Hopalong Cassidy is a fictional cowboy hero created in 1904 by the author Clarence E. Mulford, who wrote a series of short stories and novels based on the character. The first novel was Bar-20 (1906) and the last novel was # 28 Hopalong Cassidy Serves a Writ (1941)

 1. Bar-20 (1906)

8. Johnny Nelson (1920)
   9. The Bar-20 Three (1921)
aka Hopalong Cassidy Sees Red
   10. Tex (1922)
   11. Bring Me His Ears (1922)
   12. Black Buttes (1923)
   13. Rustlers’ Valley (1924)

   14. Hopalong Cassidy Returns (1924)
   15. Cottonwood Gulch (1925)
   16. Hopalong Cassidy’s Protege (1926)
   17. Bar-20 Rides Again (1926)
   18. Corson of the J.C. (1927)
   19. Mesquite Jenkins (1928)
   20. Me and Shorty (1929)
   21. Deputy Sheriff (1930)

Baroness Orczy

The Scarlet Pimpernel

The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905) (The Scarlet Pimpernel)
The First Sir Percy (1921) (The Scarlet Pimpernel)
The Triumph of the Scarlet Pimpernel (1922)
Pimpernel and Rosemary (1924) (The Scarlet Pimpernel)
Sir Percy Hits Back (1927) (The Scarlet Pimpernel)

Sir Percy Hits Back (1927)

Rafael Sabatini
(April 29, 1875 –February 13,1950)

The Sea Hawk (1915) used in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Scaramouche (1921),
Captain Blood (a.k.a. Captain Blood: His Odyssey) (1922), used in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Bellarion the Fortunate (1926)
The Nuptials of Corbal (1927)
The King’s Minion (1930)

Sapper

Bull-Dog Drummond
   Bull-Dog Drummond (1920)
   The Black Gang (1922)
   The Dinner Club (1923)

   The Third Round (1924)
   The Final Count (1926)
   The Female of the Species (1928)
   Four Rounds of Bull-Dog Drummond (1929)
   Temple Tower (1929)

Sax Rohmer
(February 15, 1883 –June 1,1959)

The Hand of the Mandarin Quong • (1922) • short story by Sax Rohmer (variant of The Mystery of the Shriveled Hand)
Tales of Chinatown by Sax Rohmer | Project Gutenberg (1922)
She Who Sleeps (1928)

Max Brand
(May 29, 1892 – May 12, 1944)

Dan Barry series

The Untamed (1919)
The Night Horseman (1920)
The Seventh Man (1921)
Dan Barry’s Daughter (1923)

Francis Beeding
John Leslie Palmer (1885-1944)
Hilary St George Saunders (1898-1951).

The House of Dr. Edwardes (1927)

Farnham Bishop
Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (September 18, 1888 – September 9, 1971)

The Altar of the Legion (1926)

 William Wallace Cook
Around The World In Eighty Hours (1920)

F. Tennyson Jesse
(March 1, 1888 – 6 August 6, 1958)

Thirty Pieces of Silver (1924) in My Favorites in Suspense (1959) edited by Alfred Hitchcock

Harold Albert Lamb
(September 1, 1892 – April 9, 1962)

The Mighty Manslayer (1918) found in The Big Book of Adventure Stories
Marching Sands. (1920)
The House of the Falcon (1921)

Collections of Public Domain Stories
The Curved Saber: The Adventures of Khlit the Cossack (1964) [C]
The Mighty Manslayer (1969) [C]

Honoré Willsie Morrow
(February 19, 1880 – April 12, 1940)

The Great Captain trilogy centered upon Abraham Lincoln:
Forever Free (1927)
With Malice Toward None (1928),
The Last Full Measure (1930).

Fighting Blood (1925) in The world’s best short stories of 1925 : William Johnston :

On to Oregon!: The Story of a Pioneer Boy (1926)

Charles Edward Montague
(1 January 1867 – 28 May 1928)

Right off the map (1927), a science fiction novel
Action (1928), short stories The Main story is also found in Great Tales of Action and Adventure
A Writer’s Notes on His Trade (1930)

B Traven
(1882 – 1969)

The Death Ship (1926)
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1927)
The Bridge in the Jungle (1929)
White Rose (1929)

Thorne Smith
(1892 – 1934)

Topper (1926)
The Stray Lamb (1929)

Tex O’Reilly
(August 15, 1880 – December 9, 1946)

The first known stories of Pecos Bill were published in 1917 by Edward O’Reilly for The Century Magazine, and collected and reprinted in 1923 in the book Saga of Pecos Bill.

Edgar Rice Burroughs
 (September 1, 1875 – March 19, 1950)

1. Tarzan of the Apes (1912)

   7. Tarzan the Untamed (1920)
   8. Tarzan the Terrible (1921)
   9. Tarzan and the Golden Lion (1923)
   10. Tarzan and the Ant Men (1924)
   11. The Tarzan Twins (1926)
12. Tarzan and the Lost Empire (1928)
13. Tarzan at the Earth’s Core (1929)

14. Tarzan the Invincible (1930)

1. A Princess of Mars (1912)

  4. Thuvia, Maid of Mars (1920)
   5. The Chessmen of Mars (1922)
6. The Master Mind of Mars (1927)

E. R. Eddison 

The Worm Ouroboros (1922)

Norse # 1 Styrbiorn the Strong (1926)
Norse # 2 Egil’s Saga(1930)

M. R. James 

• A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories. 1925. 6 stories.
• Wailing Well. 1928 (tale), Mill House Press, Stanford Dingley.

• “After Dark in the Playing Fields“, in College Days (Eton ephemeral magazine), no. 10 (28 June 1924), pp. 311–312, 314
• “There Was a Man Dwelt by a Churchyard“, in Snapdragon (Eton ephemeral magazine), 6 December 1924, pp. 4–5
• “Rats“, in At Random (Eton ephemeral magazine), 23 March 1929, pp. 12–14

Tom Swift

Victor Appleton (House Name)

1. Tom Swift and His Motor Cycle (1910)
aka Fun and Adventure on the Road

23. Tom Swift and His Undersea Search (1920)
aka The Treasure on the Floor of the Atlantic
   24. Tom Swift Among the Fire Fighters (1921)
aka Battling with Flames in the Air
   25. Tom Swift and His Electric Locomotive (1922)
aka Two Miles a minute on the Rails
   26. Tom Swift and His Flying Boat (1923)
aka Castaways of the Giant Iceberg

   27. Tom Swift and His Great Oil Gusher (1924)
aka The Treasure of Goby Farm
   28. Tom Swift and His Chest of Secrets (1925)
aka Tracing the Stolen Inventions
   29. Tom Swift and His Airline Express (1926)
aka From Ocean to Ocean by Daylight
   30. Tom Swift Circling the Globe (1927)
aka The Daring Cruise of the Air Monarch
31. Tom Swift and His Talking Pictures (1928)
aka The Greatest Invention on Record
   32. Tom Swift and His House On Wheels (1929)
aka A Trip around the Mountain of Mystery
33. Tom Swift and His Big Dirigible (1930)
aka Adventures Over the Forest of Fire

 39. Tom Swift and His Giant Telescope (1939)

Victor Appleton II (House Name)

Tom Swift Jr

 17. Tom Swift and the Visitor from Planet X (1961)
   18. Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung (1961)

Jack Williamson  

One of several called the “Dean of Science Fiction”.
He is also credited with one of the first uses of the term genetic engineering.

• • • The Metal Man  (1928)
    • The Alien Intelligence (1929)
    • The Second Shell (1929)
    • The Girl from Mars (1929) with Miles J. Breuer, M.D.

• The Metal Monster (Argosy All-Story Weekly, August 1920) A. Merritt
• The Mad Planet (Argosy, June 1920) Murray Leinster
• The Red Dust (Argosy All-Story Weekly, April 1921) Murray Leinster
• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button • (1922) • novelette by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Girl in the Golden Atom, novel (1922) Ray Cummings
• Lord Dunsany – The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924)
• The Pearl of Love • (1925) • short story by H. G. Wells
• A Round Trip to the Year 2000 (1925)William Wallace Cook
• The Monster-God of Mamurth (1926)  Edmond Hamilton
• Here and Beyond (1926) Edith Wharton
• The Electric Duel • (1927) Hugo Gernsback in Amazing Stories (1927)
• The Colour Out of Space • [Cthulhu Mythos (Lovecraft originals)] • (1927) • novelette by H. P. Lovecraft
• Armageddon 2419 A.D. (Amazing, August 1928) The original “Buck Rogers”. By   Philip Francis Nowlan
• The Justice of the Czar (1928) George Fielding Eliot in Weird Tales, August 1928
• The Copper Bowl (1928) George Fielding Eliot found in The Big Book of Adventure Stories
• The Skylark of Space  (1928) Lee Hawkins Garby and Edward Elmer Smith
• W. F. Harvey– The Beast with Five Fingers and Other Tales (1928)
• The Maracot Deep • (1929) • novel by Arthur Conan Doyle
• Marooned in Andromeda • [Captain Volmar • 1] (1930)• novelette by Clark Ashton Smith

Classic Authors

Bess Streeter Aldrich

 Bison Book

Mother Mason (1924)

The Rim of the Prairie (1925)
The Cutters (1926)
A Lantern in Her Hand (1928)

John Roderigo Dos Passos
(January 14, 1896 – September 28, 1970)
Three Soldiers (1921)
Manhattan Transfer (1925)

Ernest Hemingway

 (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961)

• Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923)
• Big Two-Hearted River (1925)
•  In Our Time (1925) 
• The Torrents of Spring (1925)
•  The Sun Also Rises (1926)

• Men Without Women(1927)
•  In Another Country (1927)  
• A Farewell to Arms (1929)

William Faulkner 

The Sound and the Fury (1929)

“A Rose for Emily” (1930)
As I Lay Dying (1930)

Edna Ferber
(August 15, 1885 – April 16, 1968)

So Big (1924),
Show Boat (1926)
Cimarron (1930)

F Scott Fitzgerald
(September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940)

This Side of Paradise (1920)
Flappers and Philosophers (1920)
The Beautiful and Damned (1922)
Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) featuring The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Great Gatsby (1925) On Film (1974) (2013)
All the Sad Young Men (1926)

 P. G. Wodehouse.

“Extricating Young Gussie” – The first appearances of Jeeves and Bertie, originally published 1915-09-18 in the Saturday Evening Post.

 1. My Man Jeeves (1919)
   2. The Inimitable Jeeves (1923) aka Jeeves
   3. Carry on, Jeeves (1925)
   4. Very Good, Jeeves (1930)

Various Authors

C. H. Chapman
(April 1, 1879 – 1972) -From Wikipedia

Greyfriars School stories ran from 1908 to 1940 and appeared in The Magnet, in a total of 1,683 weekly issues. After 1940, the stories continued to appear in book form until Hamilton’s death in 1961. You can read the The Magnet Issues here.

• The “Bunter Court” series from 1925 (Magnet Nos. 910 to 917) – by a combination of trickery and co-incidence, Bunter manages to obtain the tenancy of a stately home, Combermere Lodge, and passes it off as Bunter Court. Despite the author’s comment that this was one of the most contrived plots he had ever been forced to employ, this series is highly regarded. Remarkably, Billy Bunter succeeds in being entertaining without the reader ever being invited to feel the slightest affection or sympathy for him. After borrowing from his guests to pay the servants’ wages, and locking the estate agent, the butler, and others into the cellar to hide his tracks, Bunter finally flees before receiving his just desserts.^[16]
• The “Whiffles Circus” series from 1928 (Magnet Nos. 1069 to 1076) – Billy Bunter assumes the identity of Mr Whiffles, the proprietor of a circus, by stealing his clothes, wig and false whiskers, and sustains the impersonation over the course of the storyline when all the circus hands mistake him for the proprietor.

The Age of Innocence (1920) –Edith Wharton (1862–1937) Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 

Alice Adams (1921)-Booth Tarkington( 1869–1949) Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

The Triumph of the Egg: A Book of Impressions From American Life in Tales and Poems (1921) Sherwood Anderson.

One of Ours (1922) –  Willa Cather (1873–1947) Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

Ulysses (1922) James Joyce 

Siddhartha(1922)Hermann Hesse

Katherine Mansfield –The Garden Party (1922)

Arvid Paulson (1888-1977) Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
The Story of Don Quixote, (1922)

The Able McLaughlins (1923) – Margaret Wilson (1882–1973) Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

The Prophet (1923) Khalil Gibran 

D H Lawrence Kangaroo (1923)

So Big – Edna Ferber (1924) (1885–1968) Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

A Passage to India (1924) E. M. Forster

Arrowsmith (1925)- Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) Pulitzer Prize for Fiction  

The Painted Veil (1925) W. Somerset Maugham

Dark Laughter (1925) Sherwood Anderson. Though his books sold reasonably well, this book inspired by Anderson’s time in New Orleans during the 1920s, was his only bestseller.

Mrs Dalloway (1925) Virginia Woolf

Early Autumn (1926)- Louis Bromfield (1896–1956) Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

Dorothy Parker – Enough Rope (1926)

Anita Loos  – Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1926)

Willa Cather (December 7, 1873 – April 24, 1947) Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)

Caroling Dusk (1927) edited by Countee Cullen includes her poem I HAVE A RENDEZVOUS WITH LIFE

Owen Wister  – Safe in the Arms of Croesus (1927)

John Buchan – Witch Wood (1927)

Don Marquis (July 29, 1878 – December 29, 1937)
Archy and Mehitabel (1927)

The first illustration of Archy. Seen in an advertisement in the New-York Tribune on September 11, 1922, introducing the new column.

Henry William Williamson Tarka the Otter (1927)

Oil! (1927) Upton Beall Sinclair Jr.

Hermann Hesse – Steppenwolf (1927)

Barbara Newhall Follett  (March 4, 1914 – disappeared December 7, 1939)
The House Without Windows, (1927) Published when was twelve years old.

To the Lighthouse (1927) Virginia Woolf

Herbert Asbury – The Gangs of New York (1927)

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1892 – 1927) Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

Thornton Wilder (April 17, 1897 – December 7, 1975) The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927)—won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel (1928)

Barbara Newhall Follett   – The Voyage of the Norman D (1928) Received critical acclaim when she was fourteen.

E. M. Forster – The Eternal Moment and Other Stories (1928)

Dorothy Parker – Sunset Gun (1928)

Cup of Gold (1929) John Steinbeck

Lloyd C. Douglas, – Magnificent Obsession (1929)–Text—HTML—EPUB—MOBI

Erich Maria Remarque (Im Westen nichts Neues(1929) ; English translation: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) 

Pearl S. Buck – East Wind: West Wind (1930)

The Complete Short Stories of Saki (1930)

Inklings and Christian Authors

Arthur Owen Barfield (November 9, 1898 – December 14, 1997) was a British philosopher, author, poet, critic, and member of the Inklings.

• The Silver Trumpet novel. (1925)
• History in English Words (1926)
• Poetic Diction: A Study In Meaning (1928)

How The Reformation Happened (1928) Hilarie Belloc

E.M. Bounds

The Essentials of Prayer(1925)
The Necessity of Prayer(1929)

G. K. Chesterton

 (May 20, 1874 –June 15, 1936)

The New Jerusalem. (1920)

The Man Who Knew Too Much (stories). (1922)

What I Saw in America  (1922)

St. Francis of Assisi. (1923)

Tales of the Long Bow  (stories). (1925)

The Everlasting Man. (1925)

Father Brown Stories

1. “The Blue Cross”, The Story-Teller, September 1910; first published as “Valentin Follows a Curious Trail”, The Saturday Evening Post, 23 July 1910 and was published in the first Father Brown collection 1. The Innocence of Father Brown (1911).

 3. The Incredulity Of Father Brown (1926)
  4. The Secret Of Father Brown (1927)

The Outline of Sanity. (1926)

The Catholic Church and Conversion. (1926)

 The Return of Don Quixote (1927)

Elsie Egermeier
(July 28, 1890 – Oct. 15, 1986)
Egermeier’s Bible Story Book (1927)

Francis J. Finn 

• Bobby in Movieland (1921)
• On the Run (1922)
• Lord Bountiful (1923)
• The Story of Jesus (1924)
• Sunshine and Freckles (1925)
• Candles’ Beams (1926)
• Boys’ and Girl’s Prayer Book (1926)
• Father Finn, S.J.: The Story of His Life Told by Himself for His Friends Young and Old (edited and with an introduction by Daniel S. Lord, S.J.) (1929)^[

Laurence Housman
The Little Plays of St. Francis (1922)

Helen Keller
(June 27, 1880 – June 1, 1968)

My Religion
(1927; also called Light in My Darkness)

Ronald Knox

(February 17, 1888 – August 24, 1957)

The Viaduct Murder (1925)

The Belief of Catholics (1927)

Miles Bredon
   1. The Three Taps (1927)
The Footsteps at the Lock (1928)

Classic Non-Fiction Books

• H. G. Wells – The Outline of History (1920)
• Frederick Jackson Turner – The Frontier in American History. (1920) included ideas that formed the frontier thesis.
• Zitkala-Sa – American Indian Stories (1921)
• Here and there with A-No. 1, America’s most famous tramp (1921) Leon Ray Livingston
• E. E. Cummings – The Enormous Room (1922)
• Apsley Cherry-Garrard  –The Worst Journey in the World (1922)
• Sigmund Freud – The Ego and the Id (1923)
• Kate Douglas Wiggin  –My Garden of Memory (autobiography, published posthumously in 1923)
• D. H. Lawrence – Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)
• Henry Ford (July 30, 1863 – April 7, 1947) – My Life And Work (1922)
• Frank J. Wilstach  = Dictionary of Similes, (1916/1924)
• Mark Twain – The Autobiography of Mark Twain (1924)

• H. G. Wells – A Year of Prophesying (1925)
• Alain Leroy Locke  The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925)
• Etsuko Sugimoto (1874 – June 20, 1950) A Daughter of the Samurai (1925)
• Edith Wharton – The Writing of Fiction (1925 (essays on writing)
• H. Rider Haggard – The Days of My Life (1926)
• T. E. Lawrence – Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926)
• Susan Shelby Magoffin Down the Santa Fe Trail and Into Mexico: The Diary of Susan Shelby Magoffin, 1846–1847 (1926)
• Rudyard Kipling, – Debits and Credits (1926)
• You Can’t Win (1926) Jack Black
• Frank J. Wilstach  – Wild Bill Hickok, the prince of pistoleers (1926)
• Frederick Russell Burnham DSO – Scouting on Two Continents (1926)
• J. W. Dunne – An Experiment with Time (1927)
• Charles Augustus Lindbergh – “WE” (1927 )
• E. M. Forster – Aspects of the Novel (1927)
• H.V. Morton – In Search Of England (1927)

  Roald Amundsen
  (July 16, 1872 – c.  June 18, 1928)
  My Life as an Explorer (1927)

  

• Chains: Lesser Novels and Stories (1927) Theodore Dreiser 
• Margaret Mead – Coming of Age in Samoa (1928)
• Napoleon Hill – The Law of Success (1928)
• Henry Beston – The Outermost House (1928)
• William Wallace Cook – Plotto (1928) is a a system for plot suggestion and content structure that fiction writers can use.
• W.B. Yeats – The Tower (1928)
• Virginia Woolf – A Room of One’s Own (1929)
• Mahatma Gandhi – The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1929)

• Robert Graves – Good-Bye to All That (1929)
• Helen Keller –Midstream: my later life (1929)

Lyle Saxon
(September 4, 1891 – April 9, 1946)

• Father Mississippi: The Story of the Great Flood of 1927 (1927)
• Fabulous New Orleans (1928)
• Old Louisiana (1929)
• Lafitte the Pirate (1930)

Poetry

• T. S. Eliot – Poems (Twelve poems including “Lune de Miel” and “The Hippopotamus”) (1920)
• Robert Frost – Miscellaneous Poems (1920)
• William Carlos Williams – Sour Grapes (1921)
• T. S. Eliot – The Waste Land (1922)
• E. E. Cummings – Tulips and Chimneys (1923)
• Dorothea Mackellar   -Dreamhabour and Other Verses (1923)
• Robert Frost – New Hampshire (including “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening“) (1923)
• Muhammad Iqbal – Bang-i-Dara (1924)
• T. S. Eliot – The Hollow Men (1925)
• Langston Hughes – The Weary Blues (1926)
• James Joyce – Pomes Penyeach (1927)
• Stephen Vincent Benét – John Brown’s Body (1928)
• T. H. White, Loved Helen, and Other Poems (1929)
• T. S. Eliot – Ash Wednesday (1930)

Drama

• Karel Čapek – R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) (1920)
• Luigi Pirandello – Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921)
• Eugene O’Neill – The Hairy Ape (1922)
• George Bernard Shaw – Saint Joan (1923)
• Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings – What Price Glory? (1924)
• Patrick Hastings – The River (1925)
• Seán O’Casey – The Plough and the Stars (1926)
• Oscar Hammerstein II (book & lyrics) – Show Boat (musical play adaptation) (1927)
• Bertolt Brecht – The Threepenny Opera (1928)
• Elmer Rice – Street Scene (1929)
• Fred Duprez – My Wife’s Family (1930)

Comics

Rudolph Dirks
(February 26, 1877 – April 20, 1968)

The Katzenjammer Kids (December 12, 1897) Th Katzenjammer Kids published its last original strip in 2006, but is still distributed in reprints by King Features Syndicate, making it the oldest comic strip still in syndication and the longest-running ever.

Bud Fisher
(April 3, 1885 – September 7, 1954)

Mutt and Jeff, (November 15, 1907 – June 26, 1983) was the first successful daily comic strip in the United States.

By the 1920s, merchandising and growing circulation had increased his income to an estimated $250,000.

George Herriman (August 22, 1880 – April 25, 1944)
Krazy Kat (1913–1944)

• March 4 – October 30, 1920: The “Panoramic Dailies” period, where Herriman is allowed to experiment wildly in an unbroken daily horizontal 3 × 13 inch space.
• November 1920 on: Herriman is constrained to a more conventional daily horizontal format containing three equal split sections, with the center section further split in two. This allows the strip to be run full page, half page or a third of a page, according to editorial whim. From September 13 to October 15, 1921, Herriman regains some control (no split center section) and resumes the previous years’ format experiments.
• January 7 – March 11, 1922: In the New York Journal, 10 weeks of Saturday full-page color strips, in addition to the ongoing Sunday full page black-and-white strips (in other words, two original full-page strips every week). This is then canceled due to its lack of noticeable commercial success, compared to the new Saturday color sections in out-of-town Hearst papers which contained no Krazy Kat.
• August 1925 to September 1929: Sundays are confined to 3-row, split-middle-line format allowing some papers to reduce cartoon’s size and reformat into two daily-sized rows.

Jimmy Swinnerton (November 13, 1875 – September 5, 1974)
Mr. Jack August 30, 1903, until 1935
Little Jimmy February 14, 1904, to April 27, 1958

1920 – In E.C. Segar‘s Thimble Theatre, Castor Oyl makes his debut. 

Rupert Bear makes its debut. Her husband Herbert Tourtel writes the texts, while she illustrates.

1921 – In Frank King‘s Gasoline Alley Walt Wallet discovers a baby at his doorstep, who will later be named Skeezix and adopted as his own son.

1922 – In Billy DeBeck‘s Barney Google Spark Plug the horse makes its debut, leading to an eventual title change as Barney Google and Sparky Plug.

Rube Goldberg
(July 4, 1883 – December 7, 1970)

Boob McNutt
(June 9, 1918 to September 23, 1934)

It was syndicated by the McNaught Syndicate from 1922 until the end of its run.

From 1922 to 1926, the strip focused on Boob’s pursuit of his true love Pearl, whom he finally married, then divorced, then married again and divorced again. Goldberg inserted supporting characters from his other strips, including Mike and Ike (They Look Alike) and Bertha the Siberian Cheesehound. In 1934, he even brought in Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts, inventor of those famed Rube Goldberg machines, for a brief sojourn before the strip was cancelled.

The strip had several Sunday toppers over the course of its run, including: Bertha the Siberian Cheesehound (Jan 10-July 4, 1926), Bill and Professor Butts (July 11, 1926 – Sept 23, 1934).

Cliff Sterrett (December 12, 1883 – December 28, 1964)
Polly and Her Pals (December 4, 1912, until December 7, 1958)

An accompanying topper strip, also drawn by Sterrett, was created to run above Polly on Sundays—a pantomime strip called Dot and Dash, which ran from February 21, 1926, to June 24, 1928.^[5] Originally titled Damon and Pythias, about the antics of a cat and dog—they became two dogs in 1926. Highlighting Sterrett’s panels were oddly stylized backgrounds (trees, houses, windows, staircases), occasionally drawn in a distorted, cubist style.

1923 – Percy Crosby‘s Skippy makes its debut.

1924 – Harold Gray‘s Little Orphan Annie makes its debut.

1925 – The first issue of the American humor and cartoons magazine The New Yorker is published. On its cover their mascot, Eustace Tilley, designed by Rea Irvin, makes his debut.

1926 – Hergé publishes his first actual comic strip, The Adventures of Totor in the Belgian scouting magazine Le Boy Scout Belge. It will run until July 1929.

1927 – Ed Verdier’s Little Annie Rooney makes its debut. He will draw it for the first two years.

1928 – Dante Quinterno‘s Patoruzú makes its debut.

1929

Dick Calkins‘ comic strip Buck Rogers, based on the novels of Philip Francis Nowlan, makes its debut.

Hal Foster‘s comic strip Tarzan of the Apes, loosely based on Edgar Rice Burroughs‘s novels, makes its debut. 

Hergé‘s The Adventures of Tintin debuts in the children’s supplement Le Petit Vingtième of the newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle, with the story Tintin in the Land of the Soviets.^[95] This also marks the debut of Tintin and his dog Snowy.

Tony Velasquez‘ Kenkoy makes its debut.

Dell Comics publishes the American comics magazine The Funnies #1, which is the first American newsstand comic book of all-original material. It lacked covers, and was in that way more like a newspaper insert, but was sold independently.

In E.C. Segar‘s Thimble Theatre Popeye the Sailor makes his debut. He will quickly become the new protagonist of the series.

1930 – Blondie by Chic Young makes its debut.

The first Mickey Mouse comic strip, written by Walt Disney, drawn by Ub Iwerks, is published.