An unexpected sidelight to the Authors Guild's
lawsuit against HathiTrust is the attention it has garnered for authors and works that may have been neglected in recent years (although I was stunned that J. R. Salamanca's
The Lost Country [1958] initially was included in HathiTrust's orphan works list. Prof. Salamanca was a major presence at University of Maryland––College Park when I was a student there and has just signed an ebook deal for one of his works).
 |
James Gould Cozzens,
from the cover of the
Jan. 4, 1936, Saturday
Review of Literature |
One work initially on HathiTrust's orphaned list (pulled when the heir of the estate, Harvard, was revealed) was Pulitzer Prize winner
James Gould Cozzens's first novel,
Confusion (1924), which he published at age 21 and is deemed by Daniel S. Burt in
The Chronology of American Literature (2004) to be "pretentiously overwritten" (371). Cozzens himself ended up not thinking much of the novel, which focuses on the search by a young Frenchwoman to realize her ambitions.
Cozzens is on the
Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone list for his fine novel
The Just and the Unjust (1942; about the effects of a murder on a small town, especially its implications for the ambitious assistant DA. A 1942 issue of
Esquire chose
The Just and the Unjust as a good Christmas present for an "average reader," along with Maugham's
The Hour before the Dawn).
Cozzens also wrote "Foot in It" (
Redbook 1935; repr. as "Clerical Error," EQMM June 1950 and Muller & Pronzini, eds.,
Chapter & Hearse; adapted for
Tales of the Unexpected, 1983). Raymond Chandler thought highly of Cozzens's
Guard of Honor (1948). Gordon Van Ness has written an
interesting essay about Cozzens's work in honor of Cozzens biographer
Matthew J. Bruccoli, including Cozzens's criticism of Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, and Capote as well as his own work: "To learn to write and to write decently is simply a much longer and harder thing than is generally admitted" (203).
I also found that full text of
Leslie Ford's
The Girl from the Mimosa Club (1957, selected by Mystery Loves Company bookstore as one of the best mysteries of the 20th century) is in the HathiTrust library. After consulting with author Marcia Talley (who knows a lot about Ford's oeuvre and personal background), checking copyright records, and reviewing copyright law, I think it probably did go out of copyright.
Zenith Jones Brown—aka Leslie Ford, David Frome, and Brenda Conrad and a descendant of the illustrious Calvert family of Maryland—was born today in Smith River, CA, in 1898. Her numerous mystery works include The By-Pass Murder (1932), The Strangled Witness (1934), Ill Met by Moonlight (1937), The Simple Way of Poison (1937), Three Bright Pebbles (1938), and The Girl from the Mimosa Club (1957, selected as one of Mystery Loves Company's Best Mysteries of the Century). She died in Baltimore in 1983.
