Early rumors of his death may have been grossly exaggerated, but eventually death did come for Mark Twain. For most authors, that moment—that is, the moment of death—is a natural time to stop writing. But in 1917, seven years after Twain’s demise, reports emerged that he had dictated a new novel, via Ouija board, to a receptive medium.
The novel Jap Herron was published with an introduction by the purported transcriptionist, a journalist and author from St. Louis named Emily Grant Hutchings, about the book’s mystical origins. It came out in the midst of a “spiritualism” craze in the United States; its Bookman review, which noted that it was “unquestionably in Mark Twain’s style,” was titled “Another ‘Ouija Board’ Book.” Jap Herron wasn’t the first novel dictated from beyond the grave, but it had the highest profile “author,” which considerably raised the stakes.
Just after Hutchings and her publisher got the book to market, Twain’s estate and his publisher sued to stop it, kicking off one of the more unusual intellectual property cases of the 20th century.
Twain’s estate, while skeptical that the book was really authored by the deceased author, said that, if it were, the estate owned the rights to it and publisher Harper & Brothers had a contract to publish it.
At the heart of the case were some novel legal questions: Can the law recognize a dead person as the author of a new work? And if so, could Twain’s ghost (or its human mouthpiece), wiggle out of Twain’s agreement with Harper & Brothers to publish all of his books? Finally, even if those copyright hurdles could be cleared, what about using Twain’s pen name, which the publisher held as a registered trademark? (Twain’s legal name was Samuel Clemens.) Read More.
