Welcome To The Public Domain

Ben Harney (1872-1938). A musician, songwriter and pioneer of ragtime music, born in Tennessee, Benjamin Rober tson "Ben" Harney's early songs were great hits and the sheet music of "Cake Walk in the Sky" is the first written example of vocal ragging. In 1897, Ben Harney's Rag Time Instructor was published, giving the first description of how to improvise ragtime music by syncopating popular tunes. In 1924, the New York Times wrote that Ben Harney "probably did more to popularize ragtime than any other person."

C.J. Dennis (1876-1938). Australia's Clarence James Dennis published his first poem at the age of 19. His most famous work, The Sentimental Bloke , sold 65,000 copies in its first year of publication (1916). The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke , one of numerous spin-off publications, describes the day-to-day adventures of a man, his girl Doreen and friend Ginger Mick. The Sentimental Bloke was adapted as a stage play, silent movie, sound movie and musical; the title character even featured on a series of Australian stamps in the 1980s.

Sir Muhammed Iqbal (1877-1938). Born in what is now Pakistan into a deeply religious family, Muhammed Iqbal travelled and studied widely, obtaining qualifications in philosophy, English literature, Arabic and law from various institutions in Europe. Widely referred to as Allama (the scholar) Iqbal, his Urdu and Persian poetry is regarded among the greatest of the modern era, and the anniversary of his birth is marked as a national holiday in Pakistan to this day.

Sir Henry Newbolt (1862-1938). The Englishman Henry Newbolt graduated from Oxford and practised law until 1899. He published his first novels in the early 1890s, but his literary reputation was not established until the publication of Admirals All , a set of ballads produced in 1897. The best known of these is "Vitaï Lampada," a ballad about a future soldier who learns stoicism from playing cricket. The poem was highly regarded during the First World War, but became heavily satirized by soldiers returning from the Western Front. The poet was knighted in 1915, and awarded the 'Companion of Honour' seven years later.

Grey Owl (1888-1938). Born in England and brought up in Hastings by his grandmother and aunts, Archibald Belaney left school at 16 and moved to Canada. Once there, he changed his identity to that of "Grey Owl," telling people he was the son of an Apache woman and had emigrated from the US to join the Ojibwa. After several years working...