1922 in literature

Events

• January – Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's modernist short story "In a Grove" is published in the Japanese magazine Shinchō.
• January 24 – Façade – An Entertainment, poems by Edith Sitwell recited over an instrumental accompaniment by William Walton, are first performed, privately in London.
• January 27 – Franz Kafka begins intensive work on his novel The Castle at the mountain resort of Spindlermühle, ceasing around early September in mid-sentence.
• February 2
• *In a "savage creative storm" of less than three weeks beginning today at Château de Muzot in Switzerland, Rainer Maria Rilke writes his Sonnets to Orpheus and completes his Duino Elegies .
• *The modernist novel Ulysses by James Joyce is published complete in book form by Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company in Paris, with a further edition in Paris for the Egoist Press, London, on October 12. The U.K. customs will also seize copies entering the country.
• February 5 – DeWitt and Lila Wallace publish the first issue of Reader's Digest in the United States.
• February–September – D. H. and Frieda Lawrence migrate from Europe to the United States, visiting Australia on the way, where he completes writing his novel Kangaroo.
• March 3 – F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Beautiful and Damned is published in book form by Charles Scribner's Sons in New York; on December 10 a silent film version is released.
• c. March 8 – The Czech playwrights Karel and Josef Čapek's play Pictures from the Insects' Life is first performed at the National Theatre Brno. It is also first performed this year in English translation, in the United States.
• April – Marcel Proust's Sodome et Gomorrhe II is published in Paris.
• May 18 – Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Sergei Diaghilev, Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, Erik Satie and Clive Bell, hosted by English art patron and novelist Sydney Schiff, dine in Paris at the Hotel Majestic: their one joint meeting.
• May 27 – F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story "The [Curious Case of Benjamin Button |The Curious Case of Benjamin Button]" is published in The Smart Set magazine.
• June
• *F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" appears in Collier's magazine.
• *Over one night at his home in Shaftsbury, Vermont, Robert Frost completes the poem "New Hampshire" and at sunrise writes "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening".
• July – Having issued a 2nd edition of António Botto's poetry collection Canções through his Lisbon publishing house Olisipo, Fernando Pessoa publishes a magazine article praising Botto's courage and sincerity in shamelessly singing homosexual love as a true aesthete, sparking controversy over literatura de Sodoma.
• August – T. E. Lawrence is recruited into the British Royal Air Force as Ordinary Aircraftman 352087 John Hume Ross by Flying Officer W. E. Johns in London. Lawrence later writes The Mint about his experiences.
• Summer – F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby is set on Long Island at this time, partly inspired by Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's life from October 9 at Great Neck, New York, with the novelist Ring Lardner, newspaper editor Herbert Bayard Swope and bootlegger Max Gerlach as friends and neighbors.
• September
• *Marcel Proust's sequence À la Recherche du temps perdu begins to appear in English in a translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff of Swann's Way, as the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past. This occurs two months before the author's death.
• *T. S. Eliot and E. M. Forster stay in the country with Virginia Woolf and discuss Joyce's Ulysses.
• September 14 – Sinclair Lewis's satirical novel Babbitt is published by Harcourt, Brace & Company.
• September 22
• *Bengali writer Kazi Nazrul Islam publishes the poem "Anandamoyeer Agamane" in support of the Indian independence movement, in the Puja issue of his new biweekly Dhumketu. For this he is arrested in the Bengal Presidency and imprisoned on a charge of sedition for much of the following year. He goes on a hunger strike and composes many poems while in prison. His poem "Bidrohi" appears in his first anthology, Agnibeena.
• *F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age is published by Charles Scribner's Sons in New York.
• September 29 – Drums in the Night , at the Munich Kammerspiele, becomes the first play by Bertolt Brecht to be staged.
• October 15 – T. S. Eliot founds The Criterion magazine, with the first appearance of his poem The Waste Land. This will be first fully published in book form by Boni & Liveright in New York in December.
• October 26 – Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf is published by the Hogarth Press of Richmond upon Thames with a jacket design by the author's sister Vanessa Bell. Also this summer, Woolf writes the short story "Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street", the groundwork of the novel Mrs Dalloway.
• November – Uri Zvi Greenberg flees to Berlin after the second issue of the Yiddish literary journal Albatros, which he edits, is seized. The Warsaw authorities accuse him of blasphemy for iconoclastic depictions of Jesus, notably his prose poem "Royte epl fun veybeymer".
• December – A valise containing all Ernest Hemingway's manuscripts of the past year's writing is stolen at Paris-Gare de Lyon.
• December 6 – W. B. Yeats becomes a nominated member of Seanad Éireann in the Irish Free State.
• December 10 – The National Library of Albania is inaugurated in Tirana.
• December 20 – Jean Cocteau's Antigone appears at the reopened Théâtre de l'Atelier in the Montmartre district of Paris, with sets by Pablo Picasso, music by Arthur Honegger and costumes by Gabrielle Chanel. Génica Athanasiou plays the title rôle, with Charles Dullin as Créon and Antonin Artaud as Tiresias. There are Dadaist protests.
• unknown date – The first Newbery Medal for authors of distinguished children's books is awarded by the American Library Association to Hendrik Willem van Loon for The Story of Mankind.

  New books

Fiction

• Ruby M. Ayres – The Street Below
• Pío Baroja – La lucha por la vida
• Andrei Bely – Petersburg
• Arnold Bennett – Lilian
• E. F. Benson – Miss Mapp
• Stella Benson – The Poor Man
• Ernest Bramah – Kai Lung's Golden Hours
• Victor Bridges – Greensea Island
• Mary Grant Bruce
• *The Cousin From Town
• *Stone Axe of Burkamuka
• Edgar Rice Burroughs – At the Earth's Core
• Karel Čapek
• *The Absolute at Large
• *Krakatit
• Willa Cather – One of Ours
• Agatha Christie – The Secret Adversary
• J. Storer Clouston – The Lunatic at Large Again
• Colette – La Maison de Claudine
• Freeman Wills Crofts – The Pit-Prop Syndicate
• Aleister Crowley – Diary of a Drug Fiend
• Grazia Deledda – Il Dio dei venti
• Ethel M. Dell
• *The Knight Errant
• *Charles Rex
• Roger Martin du Gard – The Thibaults. Pt 1: The Grey Notebook
• E. R. Eddison – The Worm Ouroboros
• Edna Ferber – Gigolo
• F. Scott Fitzgerald
• *The Beautiful and Damned
• *Tales of the Jazz Age
• Mikkjel Fønhus – Under Polarlyset
• Gilbert Frankau – The Love Story of Aliette Brunton
• David Garnett – Lady into Fox
• William Gerhardie – Futility
• Ellen Glasgow – One Man In His Time
• Elinor Glyn – Man and Maid
• Sarah Grand – Variety
• Jiří Haussmann – Velkovýroba ctnosti
• Hermann Hesse – Siddhartha
• Robert Hichens – December Love
• A.S.M. Hutchinson – This Freedom
• Aldous Huxley – Mortal Coils
• Vsevolod Ivanov
• *"Armoured Train 14–69"
• *Colored Winds
• Mary Johnston – 1492
• James Joyce – Ulysses
• Franz Xaver Kappus – The Red Rider
• Faik Konica – Një ambasadë e zulluve në Paris
• D. H. Lawrence
• *Aaron's Rod
• *England, My England and Other Stories
• Sinclair Lewis – Babbitt
• Marie Belloc Lowndes – Why They Married
• Lu Xun – The True Story of Ah Q
• Katherine Mansfield – The Garden Party and other stories
• René Maran – Le Visage Calme
• Victor Margueritte – La Garçonne
• A. A. Milne – The Red House Mystery
• Paul Morand – Open All Night
• E. Phillips Oppenheim
• * The Evil Shepherd
• * The Great Prince Shan
• Baroness Orczy
• *The Triumph of the Scarlet Pimpernel
• *Nicolette: A Tale of Old Provence
• Boris Pilnyak – The Naked Year
• Marcel Proust – Sodome et Gomorrhe II
• Ernest Raymond – Tell England
• Liviu Rebreanu – Forest of the Hanged
• Marah Roesli – Sitti Nurbaya
• Berta Ruck – The Subconscious Courtship
• Rafael Sabatini – Captain Blood
• May Sinclair – Life and Death of Harriett Frean
• Annie M. P. Smithson – The Walk of a Queen
• Booth Tarkington – Gentle Julia
• Sigrid Undset – Korset
• Urmuz – Bizarre Pages
• Carl Van Vechten – Peter Whiffle
• Elizabeth von Arnim – The Enchanted April
• Edgar Wallace
• *The Angel of Terror
• *The Crimson Circle
• *The Flying Fifty-Five
• *Mr. Justice Maxell
• *The [Valley of Ghosts |The Valley of Ghosts]
• Mary Webb – Seven for a Secret
• Stanley J. Weyman – Ovington's Bank
• P. G. Wodehouse – The Girl on the Boat
• Virginia Woolf – Jacob's Room
• Francis Brett Young – Pilgrim's Rest
• Stefan Zweig
• *Amok
• *The Eyes of My Brother, Forever
• *Fantastic Night
• *Letter from an Unknown Woman
• *''Moonbeam Alley ''

  Children and young people

• Frances Hodgson Burnett – Robin
• Richmal Crompton
• *Just William
• *More William
• Dorothy Canfield Fisher – Rough-Hewn
• Hugh Lofting – The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle
• Hendrik Willem van Loon – The Story of Mankind
• E. Nesbit – The Lark
• Beatrix Potter – Cecily Parsley's Nursery Rhymes
• Carl Sandburg – Rootabaga Stories
• Walter Scott Story – Skinny Harrison Adventure
• Margery Williams – ''The Velveteen Rabbit or How Toys Become Real''

  Drama