1907 in literature

This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1907.

Events

• Early – Seven-year-old Elizabeth Bowen moves with her mother from Ireland to the south of England.
• January 3 – National Theatre opens in Sofia, Bulgaria.
• January 26 – Large sections of the audience boo the opening performance of J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. Disturbances continue for a week.^[1]
• February 4 – In a public debate at the Abbey Theatre, the poet W. B. Yeats denies trying to suppress audience distaste during a performance of The Playboy of the Western World.
• February 22 – Leonid Andreyev's symbolist drama The Life of Man («Жизнь человека», Zhizn cheloveka) is premièred at the Komissarzhevskaya Theatre in Saint Petersburg, directed by Vsevolod Meyerkhold; on December 12 it is performed for the first time at the Moscow Art Theatre, directed by Konstantin Stanislavski and Leopold Sulerzhitsky.^[2]
• March – The Diamond Sūtra, a woodblock printed Buddhist scripture dated 868, is discovered by Aurel Stein at the Mogao Caves, near Dunhuang in China; it is "the earliest complete survival of a dated printed book".^[3]
• March–April
  • Aftermath of the Romanian peasants' revolt, with a government clampdown on radical-minded authors: Constantin Banu and Nicolae Iorga have their homes raided by police;^[4] accused of sedition, N. D. Cocea is sentenced,^[5] and Barbu Lăzăreanu is expelled from the country.^[6] From Berlin, Ion Luca Caragiale watches the events with "hopelessness stifled by disgust" (as reported by his son Luca). His expose demanding social justice in the Romanian Kingdom is translated into German by Mite Kremnitz, and carried by Die Zeit of Vienna.^[7] The "pillars of fire" witnessed by Banu inspire him to name his 1911 magazine Flacăra—literally "The Flame".^[8]
  • Virginia Woolf and others of the Stephen family move within London's Bloomsbury to 29 Fitzroy Square (a former home of George Bernard Shaw).
• April 17 – August Strindberg's A Dream Play (Ett drömspel, 1901) receives its first performance, at the Swedish Theatre (Stockholm) with his ex-wife Harriet Bosse in the leading rôle.
• April 23 – Jack and Charmian London sail out of San Francisco Bay on a yacht to begin the voyage described in The Cruise of the Snark (1911).
• May–September – Kenneth Grahame writes the letters to his son that are the basis for The Wind in the Willows (1908).
• May – British publishers Thomas Nelson and William Collins, Sons (as "Books for the million") launch cheap hardback in-copyright imprints.
• May 15 – American humorist Gelett Burgess coins the term "blurb" for promotional text on a book-jacket.^[9][10]
• June 26 – Mark Twain receives an honorary doctorate of laws degree from the University of Oxford in England.
• September 7 – Gaston Leroux's pioneering locked room mystery The Mystery of the Yellow Room (Le mystère de la chambre jaune) begins serialization in L'Illustration (Paris).
• November – While tutoring a Trieste businessman in English, James Joyce reveals that he is a writer; his pupil, known to Joyce only as Ettore Schmitz, proves to be published novelist Italo Svevo. A literary friendship ensues.^[11]
• Deluxe edition of Margarete Böhme's Tagebuch einer Verlorenen published in Berlin, marking 100,000 copies in print.
• Éditions Grasset established in Paris.
• Thomas Mofolo's Moeti oa bochabela ("The Traveler of the East"), the first work of literature in the Sotho language, is published.
• Hélène van Zuylen leaves her partner Renée Vivien for another woman. Vivien's volume of love poetry Flambeaux éteints ("Extinguished Torches") is published this year.^[12]

New books

Births

• February 1 – Günter Eich, German lyricist (died 1972)
• February 3 (probable date) – James A. Michener, American novelist (died 1997)
• February 21 – W. H. Auden, English poet (died 1973)
• March 9 (February 24 O.S.) – Mircea Eliade, Romanian historian, philosopher and novelist (died 1986)
• April 30 – Jacob Hiegentlich, gay Dutch Jewish writer (suicide 1940)
• May 12 – Leslie Charteris, Singapore-born Chinese-British genre novelist (died 1993)
• May 13 – Daphne du Maurier, English writer (died 1989)
• May 27 – Rachel Carson, American environmentalist and author (died 1964)
• June 14 – René Char, French poet (died 1988)
• July 7 – Robert A. Heinlein, American author (died 1988)
• July 29 – Aileen Fox (née Henderson), English archaeologist (died 2005)
• August 12 – Miguel Torga, Portuguese author (died 1995)
• August 17 – Roger Peyrefitte, French author (died 2000)
• August 28 – Rupert Hart-Davis, English editor and publisher (died 1999)
• September 23 – Pauline Réage, French erotic novelist (died 1998)
• October 15 – Varian Fry, American journalist (died 1967)
• October 18 – Mihail Sebastian, Romanian Jewish playwright, essayist, and novelist (died 1945)
• November 14 – Astrid Lindgren, Swedish author of children's books (died 2002)
• November 27 – L. Sprague de Camp, American science fiction and fantasy author (died 2000)
• November 28
  • Alberto Moravia, Italian novelist (died 1990)
  • Mary Oppen, American poet, activist and photographer (died 1990)
• December 10 – Rumer Godden, English novelist (died 1998)
• December 18 – Christopher Fry, English dramatist (died 2005)
• Unknown dates
  • William Glynne-Jones, Welsh novelist and children's writer (died 1977)
  • E. J. Scovell, English poet (died 1999)

Deaths

• January 20 – Agnes Mary Clerke, English author on astronomy (born 1842)
• March 9 – Frederic George Stephens, English critic and member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (born 1828)
• March 19 – Thomas Bailey Aldrich, American poet and novelist (born 1836)
• April 23 – André Theuriet, French poet and novelist (born 1833)
• May 12 – Joris-Karl Huysmans, French author (born 1848)
• July 17 – Hector Malot, French author (born 1830)
• July 19 – William Gunion Rutherford, Scottish classicist (born 1853)
• August 10 – Marko Vovchok, Ukrainian novelist and short story writer (born 1833)^[13]
• August 25 – Mary Elizabeth Coleridge, English novelist and poet (appendicitis complications, born 1861)
• September 6 – Sully Prudhomme, French poet and essayist; 1st Nobel Prize winner (born 1839)
• September 7 – Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu, Romanian philologist and polygraph (born 1836)
• September 8 – Iosif Vulcan, Romanian poet, playwright and novelist (born 1841)
• October 6 – David Masson, Scottish critic and biographer (born 1822)
• October 29 – Mkrtich Khrimian, Armenian Catholicos, essayist and poet (died 1820)
• November 1 – Alfred Jarry, French dramatist (tuberculosis, born 1873)
• November 28 – Stanisław Wyspiański, Polish dramatist, poet and painter (born 1869)
• Unknown date – Mary de Morgan, English children's writer and suffragist (born 1850)

Awards

• Nobel Prize for Literature: Rudyard Kipling

References