How copyright law hides work like Zora Neale Hurston’s new book from the public - The Washington Post

"On Tuesday, Amistad Press, a division of HarperCollins, will release Zora Neale Hurston’s long-unpublished first book, “Barracoon: The Story of the Last ‘Black Cargo,’” edited by Deborah G. Plant. In late April, Vulture published excerpts from the book, which the magazine said had “languished in a vault” since 1931. I’m thrilled by the publication of Hurston’s short book on such an important subject — but I wish that we could stop talking about unpublished manuscripts in such terms. In many cases, it’s not, as such language suggests, scholarly neglect that hides these works from the public eye. Instead, the trouble begins with onerous and excessive copyright protections, protections that are meant to profit the Walt Disney Co. more than they are intended to enrich our understanding of American literature. It’s a problem that I’ve come to know well. Over the years, I’ve brought out — as a scholar or as an editor — previously unpublished work by Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Robert Frost, Jack London, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Ezra Pound, and, yes, a group of Hurston’s unpublished writings, edited by Pamela Bordelon. When I was selecting from the Hurston materials that Bordelon had collected, now nearly 20 years ago, I also obtained a copy of the typescript of “Barracoon” from the Smithsonian Archives. I knew about the typescript from reading Robert A. Hemenway’s description of it in “Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography,” which had been published in 1977. The typescript was thin, just over a hundred pages, with a few emendations and additions in Hurston’s handwriting, but it seemed complete and worthy of note. I looked into getting it published — but the rights to the work were unclear. Had the writing been conducted as part of Hurston’s fieldwork for the Federal Writers’ Project — making it a government work-for-hire and public domain? Or was it a separate literary work controlled by her estate? No one seemed to know, and no one was too interested in finding out. Unable to get answers, I eventually gave up on the effort...."