1919 in literature

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This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1919.

Events

• February – Richmal Crompton's anarchic English schoolboy William Brown is introduced in the first published Just William story, "Rice-Mould", in Home magazine.
• March – The diaries up to the end of 1917 of English naturalist W. N. P. Barbellion (Bruce Frederick Cummings) are published as The Journal of a Disappointed Man in London by Chatto & Windus. This treats his resignation to the disease multiple sclerosis of which he will die on October 22 (age 30) at Gerrards Cross.^[1]
• March 28 – Two paintings by E. E. Cummings appear in a show of the New York Society of Independent Artists.
• April 2 – Vladimir Nabokov leaves Russia with his family.
• April & October – Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby return to Somerville College, Oxford, to complete their education following war service.^[2]
• June – The Algonquin Round Table group of writers, critics, actors and wits led by Alexander Woollcott first meets at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City.
• October 28 – Arthur Ransome leaves Russia with his future wife Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina (previously Trotsky's secretary) carrying a diplomatic message for Estonia.
• November – Literary monthly The London Mercury is launched under the editorship of J. C. Squire.
• November 17 – American expatriate Sylvia Beach opens the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris.
• November 29 – The Großes Schauspielhaus opens as a theatre in Berlin, with interior designed by Hans Poelzig for the director Max Reinhardt, with a presentation of the Oresteia.^[3]
• December (approx.) – T. E. Lawrence loses most of the manuscript of Seven Pillars of Wisdom while changing trains at Reading railway station in England.
• The column "By the Way" and the pen name Beachcomber in the London newspaper the Daily Express are taken over by D. B. Wyndham Lewis as a humorous feature.
• Singer House in Petrograd (Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) is allocated to the Petrograd State Publishing House, quickly becoming the city's largest bookstore, subsequently known as Дом Книги (Dom knigi, "The House of Books").
• Alfred Harcourt and Donald Brace set up the publishing company Harcourt, Brace & Howe in New York City.

New books

Fiction

• Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (芥川 龍之介) – "Dragon: the Old Potter's Tale" (龍, Ryū, published in Akutagawa Ryūnosuke zenshū)
• Sherwood Anderson – Winesburg, Ohio
• Daisy Ashford – The Young Visiters (written in 1890 when the author was nine)
• Pio Baroja – Caesar or Nothing
• L. Frank Baum – The Magic of Oz
• André Breton and Philippe Soupault – Les Champs Magnétiques (the first book written using the techniques of surrealist automatism)
• Edgar Rice Burroughs – Jungle Tales of Tarzan
• James Branch Cabell – Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice
• Ronald Firbank – Valmouth
• Gilbert Frankau – Peter Jackson, Cigar Merchant: a romance of married life^[4]
• Philip Gibbs – The Street of Adventure
• André Gide – La Symphonie Pastorale
• A. P. Herbert – The Secret Battle
• Joseph Hergesheimer
  • Linda Condon
  • Java Head
• Hermann Hesse (as Emil Sinclair) – Demian
• E. M. Hull – The Sheik
• Jerome K. Jerome – All Roads Lead to Calvary
• Franz Kafka – "In the Penal Colony"
• Halldór Laxness – "Barn náttúrunnar"
• Jack London – On the Makaloa Mat
• W. Somerset Maugham – The Moon and Sixpence
• Christopher Morley – The Haunted Bookshop
• Baroness Orczy
  • His Majesty's Well-beloved
  • The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel
• Premchand – Seva Sadan
• Marcel Proust
  • À l'Ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower or Within a Budding Grove), vol. 2 of À la recherche du temps perdu
  • Pastiches et mélanges
• Romain Rolland
  • Colas Breugnon
  • Les Précurseurs (The Forerunners)
• Ivan Tavčar — Visoška kronika (The Visoko Chronicle, novella)
• Mary Augusta Ward
  • Fields of Victory
  • Helena
• P. G. Wodehouse – My Man Jeeves (collection)
• Virginia Woolf — Night and Day

Children and young people

• Christine Chaundler – Ronald's Burglar
• Grace May North – Adele Doring of the Sunnyside Club (first in the Adele Doring series)
• Hugh Walpole – Jeremy

Drama

• Ramón del Valle-Inclán – Divine Words (Divinas palabras)
• Edward Salisbury Field – Wedding Bells
• Susan Glaspell – Bernice
• Harley Granville-Barker – The Secret Life
• Ian Hay – Tilly of Bloomsbury
• Karl Kraus – The Last Days of Mankind (Die letzten Tage der Menschheit)
• Kwee Tek Hoay – Allah jang Palsoe (The False God)
• Avery Hopwood - The Gold Diggers
• Else Lasker-Schüler – Die Wupper (first performed; written 1908)
• A. A. Milne
  • The Camberley Triangle
  • Mr. Pim Passes By
• Liviu Rebreanu – The Quadrille
• Ernst Toller – Transformation

Poetry

• E. J. Brady – The House of the Winds
• Siegfried Sassoon – The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon
• August Stramm (posthumous) – Tropfblut
• Giuseppe Ungaretti
  • Allegria di naufragi ("The Joy of Shipwrecks")
  • La guerra ("The War")
• Louis Untermeyer (ed.) – Modern American Poetry

Non-fiction

• Henri Bergson – L'Energie spirituelle: essais et conférences (Spiritual Energy: Essays and Lectures)
• Francis P. Duffy with Joyce Kilmer – Father Duffy's Story: A Tale of Humor and Heroism, Of Life and Death with the Fighting Sixty-Ninth
• William Inge – Outspoken Essays (first series)
• John Maynard Keynes – The Economic Consequences of the Peace
• Karl Kraus – Weltgericht ("Last Judgment")
• H. L. Mencken – The American Language
• Arthur Ransome – Six Weeks in Russia 1919
• Carl Sandburg – The Chicago Race Riots, July 1919
• Prof. William Strunk, Jr. – The Elements of Style
• H. G. Wells – The Outline of History (publication of first installment on November 22)
• Arthur Graeme West (posthumous) – The Diary of a Dead Officer

Births

• January 1 – J. D. Salinger, American novelist (died 2010)
• January 7 – Robert Duncan, American poet (died 1988)
• January 20 – Silva Kaputikyan, Armenian poet (died 2006)
• January 25 – Edwin Newman, American writer and journalist (died 2010)
• March 24 – Robert Heilbroner, American economic philosopher (died 2005)
• May 16 – John Robinson, English Bible scholar, religious writer and bishop (died 1983)
• May 17 – Robert H. Adleman, American novelist and historian (died 1995)
• June 6 – Helen Forrester (June Bhatia), English memoirist and novelist (died 2011)
• June 28 – Ion Dezideriu Sîrbu, Romanian philosopher, novelist and dramatist (died 1989)
• July 15 – Iris Murdoch, Irish-born novelist (died 1999)
• July 23
  • Davis Grubb, American novelist and short story writer (died 1980)
  • Héctor Germán Oesterheld, Argentine comic book writer (forced disappearance c.1977)
• July 31 – Primo Levi, Italian novelist and memoirist (died 1987)
• August 1 – Stanley Middleton, English novelist (died 2009)
• September 13 – George Weidenfeld, Viennese-born English publisher (died 2016)
• September 26 – Matilde Camus, Spanish poet (died 2012)
• October 22 – Doris Lessing, Persian-born English novelist (died 2013)
• November 23 – P. F. Strawson, English philosopher (died 2006)
• November 26 – Frederik Pohl, American science fiction author (died 2013)
• November 29 – Frank Kermode, Manx-born literary critic (died 2010)
• December 17
  • Charlotte Jay, Australian suspense writer (died 1996)
  • Es'kia Mphahlele, South African writer (died 2008)

Deaths

• January 4 – Matilda Betham-Edwards, English novelist, poet and travel writer (born 1836)
• January 11 – Kazimierz Zalewski, Polish dramatist, critic and publisher (born 1849)
• January 31 – Paul Lindau, German dramatist (born 1839)
• May 6 – L. Frank Baum, children's writer (stroke, born 1856)
• May 10 – Ferdinando Fontana, Italian journalist, dramatist, and poet (born 1850)
• May 17 – Guido von List, Viennese poet, dramatist, and occultist (born 1848)
• June 14 – Weedon Grossmith, English writer, actor and playwright (born 1854)
• June 23 – Kolachalam Srinivasa Rao, Indian dramatist (born 1854)
• July 8 – John Fox, Jr., American novelist and short story writer (pneumonia, born 1862)
• August 11 – Andrew Carnegie, Scottish American industrialist and writer (pneumonia, born 1835)
• September 12 – Leonid Andreyev, Russian dramatist, novelist and short-story writer (heart failure, born 1871)
• October 22 – W. N. P. Barbellion (Bruce Frederick Cummings), English naturalist and diarist (multiple sclerosis, born 1889)
• October 30 – Ella Wheeler Wilcox, American author and poet (born 1850)
• November 3 – Abraham Valdelomar, Peruvian poet, essayist and dramatist (accidental fall, born 1888)

Awards

• James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: Hugh Walpole, The Secret City
• James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: Henry Festing Jones, Samuel Butler, Author of Erewhon (1835–1902) – A Memoir
• Nobel Prize for Literature: Carl Spitteler
• Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography: Henry Brooks Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
• Pulitzer Prize for Drama: no award given
• Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Margaret Widdemer, Old Road to Paradise and Carl Sandburg, Corn Huskers
• Pulitzer Prize for the Novel: Booth Tarkington – The Magnificent Ambersons

In literature

• John Dos Passos – 1919 (1932)

References

1. Barbellion, W. N. P. (1919). The Journal of a Disappointed Man. New York: George H. Doran. p. 225.
2. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
3. "Production". Global Performing Arts Database. Retrieved 2015-05-22.
4. Leavis, Q. D. (1965). Fiction and the Reading Public (rev. ed.). London: Chatto & Windus.