1917 in literature
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1917.
Francis Picabia
– The publisher Boni & Liveright is founded in New York City by Horace Liveright with Albert Boni, and initiates the "Modern Library" imprint.
February 16
April – and Virginia Woolf take delivery of a hand printing press needed to establish the Hogarth Press at their home in Richmond upon Thames.[4] Their first publication is Two Stories.
Leonard
– The first Pulitzer Prizes are awarded: Laura E. Richards, Maude H. Elliott, and Florence Hall receive the first for biography (for Julia Ward Howe), Jean Jules Jusserand the first for history with With Americans of Past and Present Days, and Herbert B. Swope the first for journalism for his work for the New York World.
June 4
– Luigi Pirandello's drama Right You Are (if you think so) (Così è (se vi pare)) is first performed, in Milan.
June 18
July – issues a "Soldier's Declaration" against prolonging World War I. He is sent by the military (with assistance from Robert Graves) to Edinburgh's Craiglockhart War Hospital, where Wilfred Owen introduces himself on August 18.[5] At Sassoon's urging, Owen writes his two great war poems, "Anthem for Doomed Youth" and "Dulce et Decorum est", although like almost all his poetry they remain unpublished until after his death in action next year. Their meeting would later inspire Stephen MacDonald's drama Not About Heroes (1982) and Pat Barker's novel Regeneration (1991).[6]
Siegfried Sassoon
Summer – The expressionist and neo-romantic literary movement in Estonia is formed by young poets and writers.[7][8]
Siuru
– At the National Eisteddfod of Wales in Birkenhead, the Chairing of the Bard ceremony ends with the chair draped in black, the winner, Hedd Wyn, having died a month earlier in battle.[9]
September 6
Ernest Hemingway
– The 51-year-old poet W. B. Yeats marries 25-year-old Georgie Hyde-Lees at Harrow Road register office in London, with Ezra Pound as best man, a couple of months after Yeats' proposal of marriage to his ex-mistress's daughter, Iseult Gonne, is rejected.
October 20
– Jesse Lynch Williams' Why Marry?, the first drama to win a Pulitzer Prize, opens at the Astor Theatre (New York).
December 25
unknown dates
Dutch East Indies
– Los caciques (The Bosses)
Mariano Azuela
E. F. Benson
– L'Orage sur le jardin de Candide (The thunderstorm in Candide's garden)
Adrien Bertrand
– A Thorn in the Flesh
Rhoda Broughton
Edgar Rice Burroughs
A Princess of Mars
– The Stucco House
Gilbert Cannan
– Under One Roof
Mary Cholmondeley
– Fanny Herself
Edna Ferber
– The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow
Anna Katharine Green
– A Daughter of the Morning
Zona Gale
– The Three Black Pennys
Joseph Hergesheimer
Henry James
The Ivory Tower
Baroness Orczy
Lord Tony's Wife
– Susan Lenox: Her Rise and Fall
David Graham Phillips
– Knights of Araby
Marmaduke Pickthall
– Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte
Horacio Quiroga
(Et Florence Robertson) – Australia Felix (first part of The Fortunes of Richard Mahony)
Henry Handel Richardson
– The Tree of Heaven
May Sinclair
– Her Irish Heritage
Annie M. P. Smithson
– Cvetje v jeseni (Flowers in Autumn)
Ivan Tavčar
– Der Spaziergang (The Walk)
Robert Walser
Mary Augusta Ward
– The Loom of Youth
Alec Waugh
P. G. Wodehouse
The Man with Two Left Feet
December 21
Diana Athill
– Agnes Leonard Hill, American author, journalist, enangelist, social reformer (born 1842)
January 20
April 9
Edward Thomas
July 31
Francis Ledwidge
– George Diamandy, Romanian journalist, dramatist, and political figure (angina, born 1867)