1914 in literature

This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1914.

Events

• January 18 – A party held in honour of English poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt at his stud farm in West Sussex brings together W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Thomas Sturge Moore, Victor Plarr, Richard Aldington, F. S. Flint and Frederic Manning; peacock is on the menu.^[1]
• February–December – Publication of New Numbers, a quarterly collection of work by the Dymock poets in England edited by Lascelles Abercrombie.
• February 2 – James Joyce's semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man commences serialization in The Egoist, a new London literary magazine founded by Dora Marsden.
• February 4 – A staging of George A. Birmingham's comedy General John Regan at Westport Town Hall in Ireland provokes a riot.^[2]
• February 10 – Thomas Hardy marries his second wife, children's author Florence Dugdale, at St Andrew's, Enfield.^[3]
• March
  • The Times Literary Supplement is published separately for the first time (in London).
  • The Little Review is founded by Margaret Caroline Anderson as part of Chicago's literary renaissance.
• March 4 – Irish-born novelist George Moore publishes Vale, the final of his 3-volume autobiographical Hail and Farewell (first in 1911).
• April 11 – First English-language performance of George Bernard Shaw's comedy Pygmalion at His Majesty's Theatre in London^[4] starring Mrs. Patrick Campbell and Herbert Beerbohm Tree, famous for the Act III line "Not bloody likely!".
• June – James Joyce's Dubliners, a collection of fifteen short stories depicting the Irish middle classes in and around Dublin during the early 20th century, is published in London.
• June 20 – First issue (of two) of the Vorticist literary magazine BLAST edited by Wyndham Lewis is published.^[5] It includes Ford Madox Hueffer's "The Saddest Story", a preliminary version of The Good Soldier.
• June 24 – Edward Thomas makes the English railway journey which inspires his poem "Adlestrop" en route to meet Robert Frost; Thomas begins writing poetry for the first time after this summer.^[6]
• July
  • E. M. Forster completes his novel Maurice, with its theme of male homosexual love; it is not published until 1971.
  • Heinrich Mann completes his novel Der Untertan, with its critique of German nationalism; it is not published until 1918.
• August
  • The literature of World War I makes its first appearance. John Masefield writes the poem "August, 1914" (published in the September 1 issue of The English Review), the last he will produce before the peace.
  • Stanley Unwin purchases a controlling interest in the London publisher George Allen.
  • At about this date Loughborough (England) publishers Wills & Hepworth publish their first illustrated children's books in the Ladybird series, Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales by E[thel] Talbot and Tiny Tots Travels by M. Burridge.^[7]
• August 25 – The library of the Catholic University of Leuven is set on fire by German troops during the Rape of Belgium.^[8]
• September – J. R. R. Tolkien writes a poem about Eärendil, the first appearance of his mythopoeic Middle-earth legendarium. Eärendil will much later appear in The Silmarillion. At this time Tolkien is an Oxford undergraduate staying at Phoenix Farm, Gedling near Nottingham.^[9][10]
• September 2 – Charles Masterman invites 25 "eminent literary men" to Wellington House in London to form a secret British War Propaganda Bureau. Those who attend include William Archer, Arnold Bennett, Hall Caine, G. K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ford Madox Hueffer, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, John Masefield, Henry Newbolt, Gilbert Parker, G. M. Trevelyan and H. G. Wells. Kipling soon afterwards writes the poem "For all we have and are". W. B. Yeats, however, refuses to sign a letter of support for the War signed by most of the participants and published in The Times on September 18.
• September 9 – Hilaire Belloc is contracted to write regular articles on the War in the new British weekly Land and Water.^[11]
• September 21 – Laurence Binyon's poem For the Fallen, containing his Ode of Remembrance, is published in The Times (London).
• September 22
  • French novelist Alain-Fournier (Lieutenant Henri-Alban Fournier), aged 27, is killed in action near Vaux-lès-Palameix (Meuse) a month after enlisting, leaving his second novel, Colombe Blanchet, unfinished; his body will not be identified until 1991.^[12]
  • T. S. Eliot (at this time in England to study) meets fellow American poet Ezra Pound for the first time, in London.
• September 29 – Arthur Machen's short story The Bowmen, origin of the legend of the Angels of Mons, is published in The Evening News (London).
• October 2 – The date predicted by Charles Taze Russell, founder of the Watchtower Society (Jehovah's Witnesses), as the date for the "full end" of Babylon, or nominal Christianity, with statements such as: "True, it is expecting great things to claim, as we do, that within the coming twenty-six years all present governments will be overthrown and dissolved .... In view of this strong Bible evidence concerning the Times of the Gentiles, we consider it an established truth that the final end of the kingdoms of this world, and the full establishment of the Kingdom of God, will be accomplished at the end of A. D. 1914...."^[13]
• November 7 – The first issue of The New Republic magazine is published in the United States.
• November 16 – M. P. Shiel is convicted and imprisoned for "indecently assaulting and carnally knowing" his 12-year-old de facto stepdaughter on October 26 in London.^[14]
• December – Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky, who writes under the pen name "Guillaume Apollinaire", enlists in the French Army to fight in World War I and becomes a French citizen^[15] after an August attempt at enlistment is rejected.
• December 31 – T. S. Eliot writes to Conrad Aiken from Oxford (where he has a scholarship at Merton College), saying: "I hate university towns and university people, who are the same everywhere, with pregnant wives, sprawling children, many books and hideous pictures on the walls... Oxford is very pretty, but I don't like to be dead."^[16]

New books

Births

• January 8 – Norman Nicholson, English poet (died 1987)
• January 15 – Etty Hillesum, Dutch correspondent, diarist and Holocaust victim (died 1943)
• January 26 – Kaye Webb, English publisher and journalist (died 1996)
• February 5 – William S. Burroughs, American author (died 1997)
• February 25 – Frank Bonham, American novelist (died 1988)
• March 1 – Ralph Ellison, American scholar and writer (died 1994)
• March 4 – Barbara Newhall Follett, American prodigy novelist (went missing in December 1939)
• March 27 – Budd Schulberg, American writer (died 2009)
• March 28 – Bohumil Hrabal, Czech poet and controversialist (died 1997)
• March 31 – Octavio Paz, Nobel Prize winning Mexican author (died 1998)
• April 4 – Marguerite Duras, French writer (died 1996)
• April 26 – Bernard Malamud, American novelist (died 1986)
• May 6 – Randall Jarrell, American poet (died 1965)
• May 8 – Romain Gary, Lithuanian-born French novelist (died 1980)
• May 12 – James Bacon, author and journalist (died 2010)
• June 15 – Lena Kennedy, English novelist (died 1986)
• June 17 – Julián Marías, Spanish philosopher and author (died 2005)
• June 26 – Laurie Lee, English poet and memoirist (died 1997)
• July 15
  • Hammond Innes, English adventure novelist (died 1998)
  • Gavin Maxwell, Scottish naturalist and author (died 1969)
• July 23 – Alf Prøysen, Norwegian author, musician and children's writer (died 1970)
• July 25 – Winifred Foley, English memoirist (died 2009)
• August 9 – Tove Jansson, Finnish children's author (died 2001)
• August 20 – Colin MacInnes, English novelist (died 1976)
• August 26 – Julio Cortázar, Argentine author (died 1984)
• September 5 – Nicanor Parra, Chilean poet and physicist (died 2018)
• September 15 – Adolfo Bioy Casares, Argentine author (died 1999)
• October 1 – Hilda Ellis Davidson, English antiquarian and academic (died 2006)
• October 6 – Joan Littlewood, English theater director and biographer (died 2002)
• October 26 – John Masters, British Raj novelist (died 1983)
• October 27 – Dylan Thomas, Welsh poet and author (died 1953)
• November 22 – Leah Bodine Drake, American poet (died 1964)
• December 12 – Patrick O'Brian (Richard Patrick Russ), English historical novelist (died 2000)

Deaths

• January 6 – Henrietta Keddie (Sarah Tytler), Scottish novelist and children's writer (born 1827)^[18]
• February 25 – John Tenniel, English cartoonist and illustrator (born 1820)
• March 17 – Hiraide Shū (平出 修), Japanese novelist, poet, and lawyer (born 1878)
• March 25 – Frédéric Mistral, Nobel Prize winning French author (born 1830)
• April 2 – Paul Heyse, Nobel Prize winning German author (born 1830)
• April 7 – Edith Maude Eaton (Sui Sin Far, 水仙花), English-born writer on Chinese (born 1865)
• May 19 – William Aldis Wright, English writer and editor (born 1831)
• May 29 – Laurence Irving, English dramatist and novelist (drowned, born 1871)
• June 6 – Theodore Watts-Dunton, English critic and poet (born 1832)
• June 21 – Bertha von Suttner, Austrian pacifist writer (born 1843)
• July 6 – Delmira Agustini, Uruguayan poet (murdered, born 1886)
• July 23 – Charlotte Forten Grimké, African American poet (born 1837)
• September 4 – Charles Péguy, French poet and essayist (killed in action, born 1873)
• September 11 – Mircea Demetriade, Romanian poet and actor (born 1861)
• September 22 – Alain-Fournier, French novelist (killed in action, born 1886)
• September 25 – Alfred Lichtenstein, German Expressionist writer (killed in action, born 1889)
• October 9 – Dumitru C. Moruzi, Russian-born Romanian political figure and social novelist (asthma, born 1850)
• October 30 – Ernst Stadler, German Expressionist poet (killed in action, born 1883)
• November 3 – Georg Trakl, Austrian Expressionist poet (cocaine overdose, born 1887)

Awards

• Nobel Prize for Literature: not awarded

In fiction

• John Buchan's thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story His Last Bow (1917) and Jean Rhys' story "Till September Petronella" (1960) are all set on the eve of World War I.
• Roger Martin du Gard's L'Été 1914 (penultimate instalment of the novel Les Thibault, 1936), Jean Echenoz's novella 14 (2012), C. S. Forester's novel The African Queen (1935) and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novel August 1914 (1971) are all set at the outbreak of World War I.

References