1923 in literature

This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1923.

Events

• January – A copy of James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses posted by the proprietor of Davy Byrne's pub in Dublin (which features in it) to a London bookseller is detained as obscene by the U.K. authorities.^[1]
• February – T. E. Lawrence is forced to leave the British Royal Air Force, his alias as 352087 Aircraftman John Hume Ross having been exposed, and joins the Royal Tank Corps as 7875698 Private T. E. Shaw.
• March – First issue of the pulp magazine Weird Tales published in the United States; it becomes noted for its specialism in horror fiction and fantasy.
• April 11 – Seán O'Casey's drama The Shadow of a Gunman, the first of his "Dublin Trilogy", opens at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin.
• April 21 – The first of a series of innovative modern dress productions of Shakespeare plays, Cymbeline, directed by H. K. Ayliff, opens at Barry Jackson's Birmingham Repertory Theatre in England.^[2]
• May 9 – The première of Bertolt Brecht's play In the Jungle of Cities (Im Dickicht der Städte) at the Residenz Theatre in Munich is disrupted by Nazi demonstrators.
• May 11 – Dorothy L. Sayers' fictional English detective and bibliophile Lord Peter Wimsey makes his first appearance in print when the novel Whose Body? is first published by Boni & Liveright in the United States; the first U.K. edition follows in October from T. Fisher Unwin.^[3]
• June 13 – Date on which Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway is set.
• July 6 – A riot breaks out at the re-staging of Tristan Tzara's Dadaist play The Gas Heart at the Théâtre Michel, Paris, between those artists aligned with André Breton and those aligned with Tzara; the conflict leads to a permanent split in the Dada movement and the founding of Surrealism as an alternative.
• Summer – Teenage English brothers Julian and Quentin Bell begin issuing a family newspaper, the Charleston Bulletin, at their Sussex home, Charleston Farmhouse, with occasional contributions by their maternal aunt Virginia Woolf.
• September – T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land (1922) is first published in the United Kingdom in book form complete with notes in a limited edition by the Hogarth Press of Richmond upon Thames, run by Eliot's Bloomsbury Group friends Leonard and Virginia Woolf, the type handset by Virginia (completed in July).^[4][5]
• December 28 – George Bernard Shaw's drama Saint Joan is premiered at the Garrick Theatre (New York City) on Broadway by the Theatre Guild with Winifred Lenihan in the title role.^[6]
• Poet Xu Zhimo founds the Crescent Moon Society in China.
• The Swedish printers Almqvist & Wiksell of Uppsala move into publishing.

New books

Fiction

• Sherwood Anderson – Many Marriages
• Gertrude Atherton – Black Oxen
• Arnold Bennett – Riceyman Steps
• Elizabeth Bowen – Encounters (short stories)
• Max Brand – Seven Trails
• Hall Caine – The Woman of Knockaloe
• Willa Cather – A Lost Lady
• Alphonse de Chateaubriant – La Brière (Brière, translated as Passion and Peat)
• Agatha Christie – The Murder on the Links
• Colette – Green Wheat (Le Blé en herbe)
• Joseph Conrad – The Rover
• Marie Corelli – Love and the Philosopher
• Susan Ertz – Madame Claire
• Hans Fallada – Anton und Gerda
• Lion Feuchtwanger – Die häßliche Herzogin (The Ugly Duchess)
• Zona Gale – Faint Perfume
• Philip Gibbs – The Middle of the Road^[7]
• Kahlil Gibran – The Prophet
• Jaroslav Hašek – The Good Soldier Švejk (Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války)
• Ernest Hemingway – Three Stories and Ten Poems
• Georgette Heyer – The Great Roxhythe
• Aldous Huxley – Antic Hay
• Ernst Jünger – Sturm
• D. H. Lawrence
  • Kangaroo
  • The Fox, The Captain's Doll, The Ladybird: Three Novellas
• Agnes Mure Mackenzie – Without Conditions
• Stratis Myrivilis – Η ζωή εν τάφω (I zoí en tafo) – Life in the Tomb; serialization)
• Zofia Nałkowska – Romans Teresy Hennert (The Romance of Teresa Hennert)
• Liam O'Flaherty – Thy Neighbour's Wife
• Marcel Proust – The Prisoner (La Prisonnière, vol. 5 of In Search of Lost Time)
• Dorothy L. Sayers – Whose Body?
• James Stephens – Deirdre
• Italo Svevo – La Coscienza di Zeno
• Alexei Tolstoy – Aelita (Аэлита)
• Jean Toomer – Cane
• Edgar Wallace
  • Bones of the River
  • The Books of Bart
  • Captains of Souls
  • Chick (short stories)
  • The Clue of the New Pin
  • The Green Archer
  • The Missing Million
• H. G. Wells – Men Like Gods
• William Carlos Williams – The Great American Novel
• Margaret Wilson -The Able McLaughlins
• P. G. Wodehouse
  • The Inimitable Jeeves
  • Leave It to Psmith
• Virginia Woolf – "Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street"^[8]

Children and young people

• Cicely Mary Barker – Flower Fairies of the Spring (first in the Flower Fairies series of at least ten books)
• Vitaly Bianki – Whose Nose is Better? (Чей нос лучше?)
• Edgar Rice Burroughs – Tarzan and the Golden Lion
• Charles Boardman Hawes – The Dark Frigate
• Felix Salten – Bambi. Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde (Bambi, a Life in the Woods)
• Hugh Walpole – Jeremy and Hamlet

Drama

• Bertolt Brecht – In the Jungle of Cities
• Garnet Holme (adapted from Helen Hunt Jackson) – The Ramona Pageant
• Georg Kaiser – Side by Side (Nebeneinander)
• Seán O'Casey – The Shadow of a Gunman
• Elmer Rice – The Adding Machine
• Arnold Ridley – The Ghost Train
• Jules Romains – Knock (Knock, ou le Triomphe de la médecine)
• George Bernard Shaw – Saint Joan
• Marie Stopes – Our Ostriches
• Ernst Toller – Hinkemann
• Sergei Tretyakov
  • Do You Hear, Moscow? (Слышишь, Москва?!)
  • Earth in Turmoil
• Sutton Vane – Outward Bound
• Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz
  • The Crazy Locomotive (Szalona lokomotywa)
  • Janulka, Daughter of Fizdejko (Janulka, córka Fizdejki)
  • The Madman and the Nun (Wariat i zakonnica)

Poetry

• E. E. Cummings – Tulips and Chimneys
• Robert Frost – New Hampshire (including "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening")
• Pablo Neruda – Crepusculario
• Sukumar Ray – Abol Tabol
• Wallace Stevens – Harmonium
• David Vogel – Lifney Hasha'ar Ha'afel (Before the Dark Gate)^[9]
• William Carlos Williams
  • Go Go
  • Spring and All

Non-fiction

• Vladimir Arsenyev – Dersu Uzala
• E. K. Chambers – The Elizabethan Stage
• Le Corbusier – Vers une architecture (Toward an Architecture)
• Sigmund Freud – The Ego and the Id
• Khalil Gibran – The Prophet
• Robert Henri – The Art Spirit
• Rudyard Kipling – The Irish Guards in the Great War
• Arthur Moeller van den Bruck – Das Dritte Reich
• Mihai Ralea – L'Idée de la révolution dans les doctrines socialistes
• Max Weber – Wirtschaftsgeschichte

Births

• January 6 – Jacobo Timerman, Argentine writer (died 1999)
• January 9 – David Holbrook, English novelist, poet and academic (died 2011)
• January 10 – Ingeborg Drewitz, German novelist and dramatist (died 1986)
• January 16 – Anthony Hecht, American poet (died 2004)
• January 29 – Paddy Chayefsky, American writer (died 1981)
• January 31 – Norman Mailer, American writer and journalist (died 2007)
• February 2 – James Dickey, American poet and author (died 1997)
• February 9 – Brendan Behan, Irish writer and playwright (died 1964)
• February 12 – Alan Dugan, American poet and author (died 2003)
• March 26 – Elizabeth Jane Howard, English novelist (died 2014)
• March 27
  • Shusaku Endo (遠藤 周作), Japanese novelist (died 1996)
  • Louis Simpson, Jamaican-born American poet (died 2012)
• March 30 – Milton Acorn, Canadian poet, writer, and playwright (died 1986)
• April 3 – Daniel Hoffman, American poet (died 2013)
• April 21 – John Mortimer, English dramatist, screenwriter and barrister (died 2009)
• April 23 – Manuel Mejía Vallejo, Colombian novelist (died 1998)
• May 1 – Joseph Heller, American novelist (died 1999)
• May 21 – Dorothy Hewett, Australian poet, playwright and novelist (died 2002)
• June 7 – Martyn Goff, English author and bookseller (died 2015)
• June 14 – Judith Kerr, German-born English children's writer
• June 24 – Yves Bonnefoy, French poet and essayist (died 2016)
• July 2 – Wisława Szymborska, Polish poet and essayist (died 2012)
• July 16 – Mari Evans, American poet
• July 17 – James Purdy, American writer (died 2009)
• August 21 – Emma Smith (Elspeth Hallsmith), English novelist and autobiographer
• September 13 – Miroslav Holub, Czech poet (died 1998)
• September 22 – Dannie Abse, Welsh poet and writer (died 2014)
• October 5 – Stig Dagerman, Swedish author and journalist (died 1954)
• October 15 – Italo Calvino, Italian writer (died 1985)
• October 24 – Denise Levertov, English-born American poet (died 1997)
• November 20 – Nadine Gordimer, South African writer (died 2014)
• November 23 – Gloria Whelan, American poet, short story writer, and novelist
• December 21 – Richard Hugo, American poet and educator (d. 1982)
• Unknown dates – Qu Bo (曲波), Chinese novelist (died 2002)

Deaths

• January 3 – Jaroslav Hašek, Czech novelist (born 1883)
• January 9 – Katherine Mansfield, New Zealand writer (born 1888)
• February 1 – Ernst Troeltsch, German theologian (born 1865)
• February 8 – Bernard Bosanquet, English philosopher and political theorist (born 1848)
• March 6 – William Boyle, Irish dramatist and short story writer (born 1853)
• March 26 – Sarah Bernhardt, French actress (born 1844)
• March 29 – J. Smeaton Chase, English-born American author and photographer (born 1864)
• May 10 – Ulderiko Donadini, Croatian novelist, dramatist and short story writer (suicide, born 1894)
• May 23 – Henry Bradley, English philologist and lexicographer (born 1845)
• June 4 – Hume Nisbet, Scottish thriller writer, poet and artist (born 1849)
• June 10
  • Louis Couperus, Dutch novelist and poet (born 1863)
  • Pierre Loti, French novelist and travel writer (born 1850)
• June 22 – Morris Rosenfeld, Yiddish poet (born 1862)
• June 24 – Edith Södergran, Finnish Swedish poet (born 1892)
• August 24 – Kate Douglas Wiggin, American children's author (born 1856)
• October 6 – Oscar Browning, English historian (born 1837)
• October 8 – Florence Montgomery, English novelist and children's writer (born 1843)
• October 14 – Marcellus Emants, Dutch novelist (born 1848)
• November 23 – Urmuz, Romanian short prose writer (suicide, born 1883)
• December 1 – Virginie Loveling, Flemish poet and novelist (born 1836)
• December 4 – Maurice Barrès, French novelist and journalist (born 1862)
• Unknown date – George Wharton James, English-born American journalist (born 1858)

Awards

• James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: Arnold Bennett, Riceyman Steps
• James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: Sir Ronald Ross, Memoirs, Etc.
• Newbery Medal for children's literature: Hugh Lofting, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle
• Nobel Prize for Literature: William Butler Yeats
• Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Owen Davis, Icebound
• Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Edna St. Vincent Millay: The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver: A Few Figs from Thistles: Eight Sonnets in American Poetry, 1922. A Miscellany
• Pulitzer Prize for the Novel: Willa Cather – One of Ours

References