1912 in literature

This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1912.

Events

January 5 – Konstantin Stanislavski and Edward Gordon Craig's seminal symbolist Moscow Art Theater production of Hamlet opens.
January 21 – Joseph Conrad achieves his first popular success as the New York Herald begins serializing his novel Chance. He broke off with it in 1906, but sold the rights to the unfinished work in June 1911. Conrad continues to work on the book, while the first chapters appear weekly in the Herald. He completes it on March 26.
March 3 – Frieda Weekley meets D. H. Lawrence in Nottingham.
April 14–15 – The ocean liner strikes an iceberg and sinks on her maiden voyage from the United Kingdom to the United States. American mystery writer Jacques Futrelle, English journalist and publisher William Thomas Stead and American bibliophile Harry Elkins Widener are among over 1500 dead. A copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in a jeweled binding by Sangorski & Sutcliffe is also lost. The event leads to a flood of poems, including Thomas Hardy's "The Convergence of the Twain".
May – Following the death of Lie Kim Hok from typhus in Batavia, Dutch East Indies, aged 58, Lauw Giok Lan takes on the work of completing his translations from the Dutch of Hugo Hartmann's Dolores, de Verkochte Vrouw into Sundanese as Prampoean jang Terdjoewal and of Geneviève de Vadans as De Juffrouw van Gezelschap.
June – Under the name I. G. Ofir, the Romanian poet Benjamin Fondane makes his publishing debut in the Iași magazine Floare Albastră, put out by A. L. Zissu.
August 10 – Virginia Stephen marries Leonard Woolf at St Pancras Town Hall in London. They honeymoon in Provence, Spain and Italy before returning.
September 21 – Harley Granville-Barker's production of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale opens at the Savoy Theatre, London, with simplified scenery, ensemble acting and naturalistic verse-speaking. It is replaced in November by his production of Twelfth Night.
October
*Edgar Rice Burroughs' character Tarzan first appears in Tarzan of the Apes in the American pulp magazine The All-Story.
*Sax Rohmer's character Fu Manchu first appears in "The Zayat Kiss" in the English pulp magazine Story-Teller, as the first installment of The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu.
October 12 – Arthur Schnitzler's play La Ronde is first performed, in Budapest. It is also first translated into French this year.
October 25 – The first issue of Simbolul is put out in Bucharest by Marcel Janco, Tristan Tzara and Ion Vinea.
December? – A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, the seminal text of Russian Futurism, is published as a manifesto and a poetry almanac. Edited and written by David Burliuk, Viktor Khlebnikov, Aleksei Kruchenykh and Vladimir Mayakovsky, it attacks the tradition of Russian Symbolism, notably works by Leonid Andreyev, Konstantin Balmont, Alexander Blok and Ivan Bunin, and ridicules independents such as Maxim Gorky.
unknown dates
*The texts of 13 Sanskrit dramas, perhaps from the first centuries BCE and probably by Bhāsa, are found by the scholar T. Ganapati Sastri in a palm-leaf codex in Kerala.
*Publication of the Loeb Classical Library, parallel text editions of the classics begins at the London publisher Heinemann.

New books

Poetry

Anna Akhmatova – Vecher
Edwin James Brady
*Bells and Hobbles
*The King's Caravan
Georgian Poetry 1911–12
Pauline Johnson – Flint and Feather
Amy Lowell – A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass
Rabindranath Tagore – ''Gitanjali ''

Non-fiction

Hilaire Belloc – The Servile State
Arnold Bennett – Those United States
Alexander Berkman – Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist
David Burliuk, Viktor Khlebnikov, Aleksei Kruchenykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky – A Slap in the Face of Public Taste
Aleister Crowley – Magick (Book 4)
Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger – Du "Cubisme"
Henry H. Goddard – The Kallikak Family
Carl Jung – Psychology of the Unconscious
Frigyes Karinthy – Így írtok ti
Pierre Loti – Un Pèlerin d'Angkor
Donald Lowrie – My Life in Prison
Dumitru C. Moruzi – Pribegi în țară răpită
John Muir – The Yosemite
P. D. Ouspensky – Tertium Organum
Bertrand Russell – The Problems of Philosophy
Ernst Troeltsch – '' Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen''

Births

January 7 – Charles Addams, American cartoonist
January 15 – Celia Dale, English fiction writer and book reviewer
January 28 – Alison Adburgham, English social historian and journalist
January 30 – Barbara Tuchman, American historian
February 10 – Ena Lamont Stewart, Scottish playwright
February 11 – Roy Fuller, English poet and novelist
February 12 – R. F. Delderfield, English novelist and playwright
February 15 – George Mikes, Hungarian-born English humorist
February 17 – Andre Norton, American sci-fi and fantasy author
February 20 – Pierre Boulle, French novelist
February 27 – Lawrence Durrell, English poet and novelist
March 7 – Dora Oake Russell, Newfoundland writer, diarist and journalist
March 12 – Kylie Tennant, Australian novelist, dramatist and historian
April 16 – Garth Williams, American children's writer and illustrator
April 24 – Marta Rădulescu, Romanian novelist and poet
May 3 – May Sarton, American writer
May 16 – Studs Terkel, American writer and broadcaster
May 20 – J. L. Carr, English novelist and publisher
May 27 – John Cheever, American writer
May 29 – Pamela Hansford Johnson, English poet, novelist and critic
June 20 – Anthony Buckeridge, English children's author
June 24 – Mary Wesley, English novelist
June 27 – E. R. Braithwaite, Guyanese-born novelist, teacher and diplomat
June 29 – John Toland, American Pulitzer Prize winning historian and biographer
July 3 – Elizabeth Taylor, English novelist
July 6 – Heinrich Harrer, Austrian explorer and author
July 14 – Northrop Frye, Canadian critic
July 17 – Michael Gilbert, English mystery and thriller novelist
August 4 – Virgilio Piñera, Cuban poet and short-story writer
August 10 – Jorge Amado, Brazilian writer
August 14 – Erwin Strittmatter, German writer
August 18 – Elsa Morante, Italian author
August 23 – Nelson Rodrigues, Brazilian author
c. September 5 – Sesto Pals, Romanian Israeli poet and philosopher
September 12 – J. F. Hendry, Scottish-born poet
September 24 – Ian Serraillier, English novelist and poet
October 31 – Oscar Dystel, American paperback publisher
November 8 – Monica Edwards, English children's author
November 12 – Donagh MacDonagh, Irish poet, playwright and judge
November 24 – Garson Kanin, American dramatist and screenwriter
November 25 – Francis Durbridge, English dramatist
November 26 – Eugène Ionesco, Romanian Absurdist playwright
December 4 – Ian Wallace, English science fiction writer

Deaths

January 7 – Sophia Jex-Blake, English medical writer and pioneer female physician
January 24 – James Allen, English self-help writer and poet
January 27 – Alexandre Bisson, French playwright, vaudeville creator and novelist
January 28 – Gustave de Molinari, Belgian economist
February 1 – Florence Huntley, American journalist, editor, humorist and occult author
February 2 – Annie Somers Gilchrist, American author
February 7 – Edward Wilmot Blyden, Liberian pan-Africanist and President of Liberia College
February 8 – Girish Chandra Ghosh, Bengali poet, playwright and novelist
March 1 – George Grossmith, English comic singer and writer
March 30 – Karl May, German novelist
April 6 – Giovanni Pascoli, Italian poet
April 10 – Gabriel Monod, French historian
April 15 – In the wreck of
*Jacques Futrelle, American author
*William Thomas Stead, English journalist
April 20 – Bram Stoker, Irish novelist and theatre manager
May 5 – Rafael Pombo, Colombian mathematician and poet
May 6 – Lie Kim Hok, Chinese writer, teacher and translator
May 14 – August Strindberg, Swedish dramatist
May 19 – Bolesław Prus, Polish novelist
June 4 – Eliza Archard Conner, American writer
June 13 – Alice Diehl, English novelist and concert pianist
July 20 – Andrew Lang, Scottish poet, novelist and critic
July 24 – Addison Peale Russell, American essayist
July 25 – Anthony E. Wills, American playwright, novelist and theatrical producer
August 13 – Horace Howard Furness, American Shakespeare scholar
August 29 – Theodor Gomperz, Austrian philosopher
September 5 – Bertha Jane Grundy, English novelist
September 9 – Berta Behrens, German novelist
October 21 – Robert Barr, Scottish Canadian short story writer and novelist
November 30 – Dharmavaram Ramakrishnamacharyulu, Telugu dramatist
December 9 – Louis de Gramont, French journalist, dramatist and librettist
December 19 – Mir Mosharraf Hossain, Bengali novelist, playwright and essayist
December 20 – Lucy Morris Chaffee Alden, American author, educator and hymnwriter

Awards

Newdigate Prize: William Chase Greene, "Richard I Before Jerusalem"
Nobel Prize for Literature: Gerhart Hauptmann
Prix Goncourt: André Savignon, "Les filles de la pluie"

1912 in literature

Events

New books

Fiction

Children and young people

Drama

Poetry

Non-fiction

Births

Deaths

Awards