The Castle of Otranto
A giant helmet falls from the sky and kills a young man on his wedding day, and the novel proceeds from there. Walpole published it in 1764 as a translation of an Italian manuscript, then admitted it was his own, and in doing so invented the Gothic novel.
It is short and often ridiculous, and the supernatural machinery is explained away at the end in a way that satisfies nobody. Read it as a historical document: everything later Gothic fiction does, from haunted castles to usurping nobles, is here in rough form. It is also surprisingly readable.
Public-domain status
First published in 1764. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Horace Walpole died in 1797, so this work has been free to republish there since 1868.
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