1916 in literature

This article contains information about the literary persons, events and publications of 1916.

Events

January
* The Journal of Negro History is founded by Carter G. Woodson, father of "Black History" and "Negro History Week" in the United States.
*Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's short story The Nose is published in a student magazine.
March 1 – The National Library of Wales completes its transfer to purpose-built premises in Aberystwyth.
March 22 – J. R. R. Tolkien and Edith Bratt marry at St Mary Immaculate Roman Catholic Church, Warwick, England. They will serve as inspiration for the fictional characters Beren and Lúthien. Tolkien leaves for military service in France at the beginning of June.
March 30 – Don Marquis introduces the characters Archy and Mehitabel in "The Sun Dial" column in The Evening Sun (New York City). Archy is a poetry-writing cockroach unable to operate the typewriter shift key; Mehitabel is a cat.
April–June – Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry live as neighbours to D. H. and Frieda Lawrence at Higher Tregerthen, near Zennor in Cornwall.
April 24–30 – In the Easter Rising in Ireland, members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood proclaim an Irish Republic and the Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army occupy the General Post Office and other buildings in Dublin, before surrendering to the British Army. Of the seven subsequently executed leaders of the Rising, Thomas MacDonagh, Patrick Pearse and Joseph Plunkett are poets and James Connolly a balladeer and playwright. The events are the theme of W. B. Yeats' poem "Easter, 1916", first published this September.
May 16 – Natsume Sōseki's novel Light and Darkness begins to be serialized in the Tokyo and Osaka editions of the newspaper Asahi Shimbun, but will remain unfinished at the author's death on December 9, aged 49.
July 1
*The poets W. N. Hodgson, Will Streets, Gilbert Waterhouse, Henry Field, Alfred Ratcliffe, Alexander Robertson and Bernard White are among 19,000 British soldiers killed on the First day on the Somme alone. The same day is chosen for the death of fictitious poet Cecil Valance in Alan Hollinghurst's 2011 novel The Stranger's Child. The Battle of the Somme continues until October 18, during which time American poet Alan Seeger, Irish writer Tom Kettle, English poet Edward Tennant, English short story writer Saki and English bowler Percy Jeeves are all killed. The English writer Robert Graves, novelist Stuart Cloete, playwright/actor Arnold Ridley and artist/poet David Jones are seriously injured – Graves is for a time believed killed. Ford Madox Hueffer suffers concussion and shell shock. A. A. Milne and J. R. R. Tolkien are invalided out. The English poet Siegfried Sassoon wins the Military Cross. The Cameron Highlander Dòmhnall Ruadh Chorùna composes the Scottish Gaelic love song An Eala Bhàn in the oral literature tradition. The future U.K. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan is wounded in September's Battle of Flers–Courcelette; sheltering in a slit trench, he reads Aeschylus in the original Greek.
*W. B. Yeats makes his fifth and final proposal of marriage to the newly widowed Maud Gonne in France.
c. July–December – Poets Terence MacSwiney and Darrell Figgis are among Irish republicans detained in Reading Gaol following the Easter Rising.
Summer – In the United States, 15-year-old Margaret Mitchell writes a novella called Lost Laysen in two notebooks. She will later give the manuscript to a boyfriend and the book remains lost until the mid-1990s. It is published in 1996. Meanwhile, Mitchell will go on to write Gone with the Wind.
September – Joseph Conrad's novella The Shadow-Line begins to be serialized in The English Review and the Metropolitan Magazine (New York).
October 6 – The poet Perpessicius loses his right arm fighting for the Romanians in a skirmish at Muratan.
October 19 – New premises for the German National Library open in Leipzig.
December – The first of many editions of Robert Baden-Powell's The Wolf Cub's Handbook is published.
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 by B. W. Huebsch.

New books

Poetry

Pauline B. Barrington — "Education"
Robert Frost – Mountain Interval
Yvan Goll – Requiem pour les morts de l'Europe
Joseph Lee – Ballads of Battle
Amy Lowell – Men, Women, and Ghosts
Antonio Machado – Campos de Castilla
Charlotte Mew – The Farmer's Bride
Ezra Pound – Lustra
Carl Sandburg – Chicago Poems
Muriel Stuart – Christ at Carnival and Other Poems
Katharine Tynan – Holy War
Gilbert Waterhouse – Rail-Head and other poems
W. B. Yeats – "Easter, 1916"
Sergei Yesenin – Радуница

Non-fiction

Max Aitken – Canada in Flanders
Hall Caine – Our Girls: Their Work for the War
Max Dvořák – Katechismus der Denkmalpflege
Ferdinand de Saussure – Cours de linguistique générale
Albert Einstein – "Die Grundlage der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie", Annalen der Physik 49
Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound – Noh, or, Accomplishment: A Study of the Classical Stage of Japan
Israel Gollancz – A Book of Homage to Shakespeare
Madison Grant – The Passing of the Great Race; or, The Racial Basis of European History
Ellen La Motte – The Backwash of War
Sydney Loch – The Straits Impregnable
Sir Oliver Lodge – Raymond; or, Life and Death, with Evidence for Survival of Memory and Affection after Death
Ezra Pound – Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir
George Barbu Știrbei – Feuilles d'automne et feuilles d'hiver
Mrs Humphry Ward – England's Effort: Six Letters to an American Friend
Frances Garnet Wolseley, 2nd Viscountess Wolseley – ''Women on the Land''

Births

January 10 – Bernard Binlin Dadié, Ivorien author and politician
February 15 – Ian Ballantine, American publisher
March 4
*Giorgio Bassani, Italian author
*Hans Eysenck, German-born England-based psychologist
April 12 – Beverly Cleary, American children's author
April 15 – Helene Hanff, American writer and critic
May 12 – Albert Murray, American critic, novelist and biographer
May 21 – Harold Robbins, American novelist
May 28 – Walker Percy, American novelist
June 16 – Barbara Skelton, English fiction writer, memoirist and literary figure
July 14 – Natalia Ginzburg, Italian author
July 24 – John D. MacDonald, American novelist and short story writer
August 28
*C. Wright Mills, American sociologist
*Jack Vance, American mystery, fantasy, and science fiction writer
September 13 – Roald Dahl, Welsh-born children's author
September 14 – Eric Bentley, English-born American drama critic
September 17 – Mary Stewart, English romantic suspense novelist
September 19 – Giles Romilly, English journalist
September 25 – Jessica Anderson, Australian novelist and short story writer
September 27 – S. Yizhar, Israeli author
October 3 – James Herriot, English writer and veterinary surgeon
October 10 – David Gascoyne, English Surrealist poet
October 11 – Ahmad Abd al-Ghafur Attar, Saudi Arabian writer, journalist and poet
October 12 – Alice Childress, African American playwright, actress and novelist
November 7 – Ian Niall, Scottish novelist and non-fiction writer
November 18 – Peter Weiss, German writer, painter and filmmaker
November 24 – James Pope-Hennessy, English biographer and travel writer
December 14 – Shirley Jackson, American novelist and short story writer
December 17 – Penelope Fitzgerald, English novelist
December 30 – Lili Berger, Yiddish writer, antifascist militant and literary critic

Deaths

January 27 – C. Morton Horne, Irish writer and performer
February 6 – Rubén Darío, Nicaraguan poet
February 12 – John Townsend Trowbridge, American author
February 28 – Henry James, American-born novelist
April 19 – Emily Lee Sherwood Ragan, American author and journalist
April 26 – Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Portuguese novelist and poet
May 3 – Patrick Pearse, poet and Irish nationalist leader
May 13 – Sholem Aleichem, Ukrainian-born humorist
May 25 – Jane Dieulafoy, French archaeologist and novelist
May 28 – Ivan Franko, Ukrainian writer, translator and political activist
May 31 – Gorch Fock, German poet and novelist
June 4 – Emma Rood Tuttle, American writer and poet
June 7 – Émile Faguet, French critic
June 30 – Eunice Gibbs Allyn, American correspondent, author, songwriter
July 1
*W. N. Hodgson, English war poet
*Gilbert Waterhouse, English architect and war poet
August 8 – Lily Braun, German feminist writer
August 27 – Petar Kočić, Bosnian novelist and politician
September 7 – Annie Le Porte Diggs, Canadian-born American activist, journalist, author
September 22 – Edward Tennant, English war poet
October 7 – James Whitcomb Riley, American poet
October 21 – Olindo Guerrini, Italian poet
October 25 – John Todhunter, Irish poet and dramatist
November 14 – Saki, English short-story writer
November 15 – Molly Elliot Seawell, American novelist
November 20 – Lucie Fulton Isaacs, American writer, philanthropist, suffragist
November 22 – Jack London, American novelist
November 27 – Émile Verhaeren, Belgian Symbolist poet
December 9 – Natsume Sōseki, Japanese novelist

Awards

Nobel Prize in Literature: Carl Gustaf Verner von Heidenstam

1916 in literature

Events

New books

Fiction

Children and young people

Drama

Poetry

Non-fiction

Births

Deaths

Awards