1922 in literature

This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1922.

Events

This is a significant year for high modernism in literature.

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 (Das Schloss) 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 (short story)|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

Poetry

Mário de Andrade – Paulicéia Desvairada
Manuel Maples Arce – Andamios interiores
Edmund Blunden – The Shepherd, and Other Poems of Peace and War
A. E. Coppard – Hips and Haws
T. S. Eliot – The Waste Land
Thomas Hardy – Late Lyrics and Earlier, with Many Other Verses
A. E. Housman – Last Poems
Claude McKay – Harlem Shadows
Isaac Rosenberg – Poems
Sacheverell Sitwell – The Hundred and One Harlequins, and Other Poems
Birger Sjöberg – Fridas Bok
César Vallejo – Trilce
Mohammad Yamin – ''Tanah Air''

Non-fiction

E. E. Cummings – The Enormous Room
Albert Einstein – The Meaning of Relativity: Four Lectures Delivered at Princeton University, May 1921
Leonora Eyles – The Woman in the Little House
Benjamin Fondane – Imagini și cărți din Franța
James George Frazer – The Golden Bough
Magema Magwaza Fuze – Abantu Abamnyama Lapa Bavela Ngakona
Frank Harris – My Life and Loves
Agnes Jekyll – Kitchen Essays
T. E. Lawrence – Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Walter Lippmann – Public Opinion
James O. McKinsey – Budgetary Control
Bronisław Malinowski – Argonauts of the Western Pacific
W. Somerset Maugham – On a Chinese Screen
Hans Prinzhorn – Artistry of the Mentally Ill
Radu Rosetti – Amintiri
G. M. Trevelyan – British History in the Nineteenth Century, 1782–1901
Ludwig Wittgenstein – ''Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus''

Births

January 1 – Idris Jamma', Sudanese poet
January 10 – Terence Kilmartin, Irish journalist and translator
January 22 – Howard Moss, American poet, playwright, and critic
January 23 – Vernon Scannell, British poet
February 6 – Denis Norden, English comedy writer
February 18 – Helen Gurley Brown, American editor and publisher
March 7 – Sara Woods, British crime fiction writer
March 12 – Jack Kerouac, American author of On the Road
March 27 – Dick King-Smith, English children's author
April 2 – Zenia Larsson, Polish-Swedish writer and sculptor of Jewish descent
April 4 – Máire Mhac an tSaoi, Irish poet and scholar
April 13 – John Braine, English novelist
April 16
*Kingsley Amis, English novelist
*Samuel Youd, English science fiction novelist
April 22 – Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Cuban novelist
April 28 – Alistair MacLean, Scottish novelist
May 6 – Alan Ross, Indian-born English poet and editor
May 8 – Mary Q. Steele, American naturalist and author
May 27 – Sidney Keyes, English poet
May 30 – Hal Clement, American science fiction writer
June 2 – Božena Mačingová, Slovak writer, author of books for children and young adults
June 11 – Erving Goffman, Canadian sociologist
June 29 – Vasko Popa, Yugoslav poet
June 30 – Mollie Hunter, Scottish novelist and children's writer
July 12 – Michael Ventris, English translator
July 15 – Cathal Ó Sándair, Irish language novelist
July 17 – Donald Davie, English poet
July 19 – George McGovern, American author and politician
August 9 – Philip Larkin, English poet
August 18 – Alain Robbe-Grillet, French novelist
September 12 – Jackson Mac Low, American poet
October 3 – Raffaele La Capria, Italian novelist and screenwriter
October 21 – Peter Demetz, Czech-born American scholar of German literature
November 11 – Kurt Vonnegut, American novelist
November 16 – José Saramago, Portuguese writer
November 29 – Michael Howard, English historian, author and academic
November 26 – Charles M. Schulz, American cartoonist
December 11 – Grace Paley, American writer
December 28 – Stan Lee, American comic-book writer and editor
December 29 – William Gaddis, American novelist
December 30 – Jane Langton, American author and illustrator
December – Lu Yongfu, Chinese translator

Deaths

January 3 – Berthold Delbrück, German linguist
January 12 – Thomas Gibson Bowles, English founder of The Lady and Vanity Fair
January 27
*Nellie Bly, American journalist
*Giovanni Verga, Italian author
February 3
*Sarah Newcomb Merrick, Canadian-born American writer, teacher, and physician
*John Butler Yeats, Irish artist and poet
February 21 – Nellie Blessing Eyster, American journalist, writer, and reformer
February 25 – Emma Southwick Brinton, American army nurse and foreign correspondent
March 20 – Lizzie P. Evans-Hansell, American novelist and short-story writer
June 12 – Wolfgang Kapp, Prussian journalist
June 28 – Velimir Khlebnikov, Russian writer
July 4 – Laura Rosamond White, American author, poet, editor
July 8 – Mori Ōgai, Japanese novelist and poet
July 26 – Ehrman Syme Nadal, American author
August 14
* Barbara Galpin, American journalist
* Alfred Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe, British newspaper proprietor
August 25 – Edward George Honey, Australian journalist
August 29 – Georges Sorel, French philosopher
September 2 – Henry Lawson, Australian poet
September 4 – George R. Sims, English writer
September 10 – Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, English poet and radical
October 6 – Walter Howard, English playwright
October 13 – Elizabeth Williams Champney, American author
October 22 – Lyman Abbott, American theologian
October 30 – Géza Gárdonyi, Hungarian historical novelist
November 1 – Lima Barreto, Brazilian novelist and journalist
November 18 – Marcel Proust, French author
November 24 – Erskine Childers, Irish historian and novelist
November 27 – Alice Meynell, English poet
December 13 – Hannes Hafstein, Icelandic poet and prime minister
December 19 – Clementina Black, English novelist and political writer
unknown date – Mary Anna Needell, English novelist

Awards

Hawthornden Prize for poetry: Edmund Blunden
James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: David Garnett, Lady into Fox
James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: Percy Lubbock, Earlham
Newbery Medal for children's literature: Hendrik Willem van Loon, The Story of Mankind
Nobel Prize in Literature: Jacinto Benavente
Prix Goncourt: Henri Béraud, Le Martyre de l'obèse
Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Eugene O'Neill, Anna Christie
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Edwin Arlington Robinson, Collected Poems
Pulitzer Prize for the Novel: Booth Tarkington, ''Alice Adams''

1922 in literature

Events

New books

Fiction

Children and young people

Drama

Poetry

Non-fiction

Births

Deaths

Awards