1916 in literature

The year 1916 in literature involved some significant literary events and new books.

Events

• January - The Journal of Negro History is founded by Carter G. Woodson, the father of "Black History" and "Negro History Week", in the United States.^[1]
• March 22 - Marriage of J. R. R. Tolkien and Edith Bratt at St. Mary Immaculate Roman Catholic Church, Warwick, England. They will serve as the inspiration for the fictional characters Lúthien and Beren. Tolkien leaves for military service in France just over two months later.
• July 1 - First day on the Somme: Poets W. N. Hodgson, Will Streets, Gilbert Waterhouse, Henry Field, Alfred Ratcliffe, Alexander Robertson and Bernard White are among the 19,000 British killed on this day alone.^[2] The Battle of the Somme continues until October 18, during which time American poet Alan Seeger (serving with the French), Irish writer Tom Kettle, English poet Edward Wyndham Tennant and English short story writer 'Saki' are all killed; English writer Robert Graves is seriously wounded (believed killed); English poet Siegfried Sassoon wins the Military Cross; and Cameron Highlander Dòmhnall Ruadh Chorùna composes the Scottish Gaelic love song An Eala Bhàn ("The White Swan") in the oral literature tradition.
• Summer - In the United States 15-year-old Margaret Mitchell writes the manuscript of a novella called Lost Laysen in two notebooks. She will later give the manuscript to a boyfriend and the book remains lost until rediscovered in the mid-1990s and published in 1996. Meanwhile, Mitchell will go on to write Gone with the Wind.
• October 19 - New building for the German National Library opens in Leipzig.
• December 29 - James Joyce's semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is first published complete in book form in New York.

New books

• Sherwood Anderson - Windy McPherson's Son
• Henri Barbusse - Under Fire (Le Feu)
• L. Frank Baum
  • Rinkitink in Oz
  • Mary Louise (as "Edith Van Dyne")
• Adrien Bertrand - L'Appel du sol
• John Edward Bruce - The Awakening of Hezekiah Jones
• Edgar Rice Burroughs - The Beasts of Tarzan
• Alfred Döblin - The Three Leaps of Wang Lun (Die drei Sprünge des Wang-lun, dated 1915)
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman - With Her in Ourland
• Ellen Glasgow - Virginia
• Sarah Grand - The Winged Victory
• Louis Hemon - Maria Chapdelaine
• William Dean Howells - The Leatherwood God
• James Joyce - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Franz Kafka - The Metamorphosis ("Die Verwandlung"; first book publication)
• Grace King - The Pleasant Ways of St. Medard
• Ring Lardner - You Know Me Al
• George Moore - The Brook Kerith: A Syrian Story
• Baroness Orczy - Leatherface
• May Sinclair - Tasker Jevons
• Rabindranath Tagore - The Home and the World
• Booth Tarkington - Seventeen: A Tale of Youth and Summer Time and the Baxter Family Especially William
• Mark Twain - The Mysterious Stranger
• Eduard Vilde - Mäeküla piimamees ("The Milkman of Mäeküla")
• Mrs Humphry Ward
  • Lady Connie
  • England's Effort

New drama

• Harley Granville-Barker - Farewell to the Theatre
• Franz Kafka - The Warden of the Tomb (written)
• Susan Glaspell - Trifles
• Eden Philpotts - The Farmer's Wife
• Sophie Treadwell - Claws

Short stories

• Akutagawa Ryūnosuke - The Nose
• Thomas Burke
  • Limehouse Nights
  • Beryl and the Croucher
  • The Chink and the Child
  • Gina of the Chinatown

Poetry

• Robert Frost - Mountain Interval
• Antonio Machado - Campos de Castilla (revised edition)
• Carl Sandburg - Chicago Poems
• Gilbert Waterhouse - Rail-Head and other poems (published posthumously)
• W. B. Yeats - "Easter, 1916" (written)

Non-fiction

• Robert Baden-Powell - The Wolf Cub's Handbook
• Hall Caine - Our Girls: Their Work for the War
• Ferdinand de Saussure - Cours de linguistique générale
• Albert Einstein - "Die Grundlage der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie" (on general relativity), Annalen der Physik 49
• Mrs Humphry Ward - England's Effort

Births

• March 4
  • Giorgio Bassani, Italian author (died 2000)
  • Hans Eysenck, psychologist (died 1997)
• April 12 - Beverly Cleary, children's author
• April 15 - Helene Hanff, author (died 1997)
• May 12 - Albert Murray, literary and jazz critic, novelist and biographer
• May 21 - Harold Robbins, blockbuster novelist (died 1997)
• May 28 - Walker Percy, novelist (died 1990)
• July 14 - Natalia Ginzburg, author (died 1991)
• September 13 - Roald Dahl, children's author (died 1990)
• September 17 - Mary Stewart, romantic suspense novelist
• September 19 - Giles Romilly, journalist (died 1967)
• October 3 - James Herriot, popular author of "vet" stories (died 1995)
• October 16 - David Gascoyne, author and poet (died 2001)
• November 18 - Peter Weiss, German writer, painter, graphic artist and experimental filmmaker (died 1982)
• December 14 - Shirley Jackson, horror novelist and short story writer (died 1965)
• December 17 - Penelope Fitzgerald, novelist (died 2000)

Deaths

• February 6 - Rubén Darío, Nicaraguan poet, 49
• February 28 - Henry James, novelist
• April 26 - Mário de Sá-Carneiro, novelist and poet
• May 3 - Patrick Pearse, poet and Irish nationalist leader, 36 (executed by firing squad)
• May 13 - Sholom Aleichem, Yiddish humorist
• May 31 - Gorch Fock, poet and novelist
• June 7 - Émile Faguet, critic, 68
• July 1 - Gilbert Waterhouse, war poet, 33 (killed in action)
• August 8 - Lily Braun, feminist writer
• August 27 - Petar Kočić, Bosnian novelist and pollitician, 39
• September 22 - Edward Wyndham Tennant, war poet (killed in action)
• October 7 - James Whitcomb Riley, poet, 66
• October 21 - Olindo Guerrini, Italian poet, 71
• October 25 - John Todhunter, poet and dramatist
• November 14 - Saki, author
• November 15 - Molly Elliot Seawell, novelist
• November 22 - Jack London, novelist
• November 27 - Emile Verhaeren, Symbolist poet

Awards

• Nobel Prize for Literature: Carl Gustaf Verner von Heidenstam (Swedish)

In fiction

• April 24–29 - The Easter Rising in Dublin features in the following Irish works
  • Seán O'Casey's play The Plough and the Stars (1926)
  • Jamie O'Neill's novel At Swim, Two Boys (2001)
• July 1 - First day on the Somme: Fictitious poet Cecil Valance, featuring in Alan Hollinghurst's novel The Stranger's Child (2011), is killed at Maricourt.
• November (October O.S.) - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novel November 1916 (Oktyabr 1916) is set in the lead-up to the Russian Revolution.

References