It’s that time of year again, in which a few past gems will soon slip into the public domain. Authors who died in 1955, books published in 1930, plus some music and song. Here are some items I dug up, which may perhaps interest Tentaclii readers. Possibly there may be some I’ve missed, and if so please comment.
Writers who died in 1955:
Mindret Loeb Lord, a lesser Weird Tales writer in the late 1930s and 40s.
Nat Schachner, early U.S. advocate for manned space travel and a founder of the American Interplanetary Society. Prolific SF story writer of the 1930s (for Astounding and others) and also published a smattering of pulp horror tales.
Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, first a romance writer and then (as the Depression deepened) a suspense/mystery writer for the early pulp paperbacks. Apparently also published one children’s fantasy novel titled Miss Kelly.
Wallace Stevens, poet. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered him, but his poetry is said to be… “abstract, fantastical, speculative, artificial, strange”.
Thomas Mann, author of the classic Death in Venice and others.
Teilhard de Chardin, the speculative/mystical thinker.
Ortega y Gasset, the famous Spanish author.
False alarms:
SF author Bryan Berry (aka Rolf Garner) did not die in 1955, as was once claimed. Research now shows 1966.
Tod Browning’s Dracula movie is said by some to be 1930, but appears to have been released in 1931.
Some pages on Wikipedia have Jean Cocteau’s surrealist first film The Blood of a Poet as 1930, but the release was 1932.
In nations with copyright expiry as ‘life +50 years’:
James Blish, SF author.
Murray Leinster, SF author.
P.G. Wodehouse.
Fiction published in 1930:
H. Rider Haggard, his late book Belshazzar.
Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men, the groundbreaking classic of modern SF.
E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith, Skylark Three, featuring the first truly epic space-opera space battles.
Jack Williamson, The Cometeers, a space-faring SF novel.
Franz Kafka’s The Castle, in the first English translation.
Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons.
Philip Wylie, Gladiator, a proto-superhero novel showing how a ‘real’ serum-induced superhero would struggle to live in 1920s America.
Hugh Lofting, The Twilight of Magic. By the Doctor Doolittle author, said to be a long fairy-tale novel for children. Update: U.S. copyright page says 1930, but apparently it did no appear in U.S. bookshops until 1931.
Andre Maurois, Patapoufs et Filifers. In English in 1941 as Fattypuffs and Thinifers. Short 92-page children’s comedy-fantasy of an underground world divided into the fat and the thin. Potential for a new translation/adaptation from the 1930 French original?
Apparently also a number of R.E. Howard’s Solomon Kane tales.
Movies of 1930:
Animal Crackers, the Marx Brothers movie.
The Climax, said to be about mental telepathy, from a notable play on the topic. Later filmed again.
Hell’s Angels, the big-budget Howard Hughes aviation movie.
Just Imagine, an early science-fiction musical movie with impressive Metropolis-style sets and props, but little else. Its spaceship was later re-used for the Flash Gordon series. The versions that survive are said to have terrible visual quality and there are many gaps.
In Germany… “released in 1930 with the title Die Zwolfte Stunde – Eine Nacht des Grauens [‘The Twelfth Hour – A Night of Horror’], an ‘artistic adaptation’ of Noseferatu made by a Dr. Waldemar Roger.” I just found the mention of it, and I’m not sure if it survives.
Also in Germany, Alraune, which sounds like a sort of updated Frankenstein?
Also: Robert Riskin died 1955, the screenwriter for the big-budget movie of Lost Horizon (1937).
Non-fiction from 1930:
[Wikipedia:] “Romanticism’s celebration of euphoria and sublimity has always been dogged by an equally intense fascination with melancholia, insanity, crime and shady atmosphere; with the options of ghosts and ghouls, the grotesque, and the irrational. The name “Dark Romanticism” was given to this form by the literary theorist Mario Praz in his lengthy study of the genre published in 1930, The Romantic Agony. … First English translation 1933″.
Sir James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe. Popular science book by a leading British astrophysicist, possibly useful for understanding the state of knowledge of the cosmos in Lovecraft’s time. Appears to have been published in America in the same year. Also appears to have been read by Lovecraft.
Winthrop Packard, Wild Pastures. A “vivid and descriptive account of Packard’s experiences traveling through the vast and rugged terrain of the Western United States” as the culture of the Old West faded or changed.
The Mound Builders. A book-length reconstruction of the prehistoric American ‘mound builders’ culture, by an archeologist adhering to the knowledge of his time.
James Frazer, Myths of the Origin of Fire. Golden Bough author, possibly only a British publication?
Contemporary Illustrators of Children’s Books, a USA publication. Seemingly a survey rather than a directory?
Chemical Magic. USA, book on stage and trick-magic tricks done with chemicals and inks. Such a book would never be published today, but back then nearly every middle-class boy had a chemistry set at home.
Walter de la Mare, Desert Islands and Robinson Crusoe. USA book, with his essay on the topic followed by his very wide range of quotations on the theme as found in pre-1930 poetry and tales.
Magazines and illustrators:
Florence Susan Harrison, died 1955. Illustrated children’s books in a Pre-Raphaelite ‘knights and maidens’ style, adapted for story-book illustration.
