Events
This is a significant year for high modernism in literature. [1]
- January – Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's modernist short story "In a Grove" (藪の中, Yabu no naka) 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. [2]
- 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. [3]
- 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 (Die Sonette an Orpheus) and completes his Duino Elegies (Duineser Elegien).
- The modernist novel Ulysses by James Joyce is published complete in book form by Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company in Paris (on 2/2/22, Joyce's 40th birthday), with a further edition in Paris for the Egoist Press, London, on October 12 (much of it seized by the United States Customs Service). The U.K. customs will also seize copies entering the country. [4]
- February 5 – DeWitt and Lila Wallace publish the first issue of Reader's Digest in the United States. [5]
- 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 (Ze života hmyzu, also known as The Insect Play, published 1921) 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 (part of the novel sequence À la Recherche du temps perdu ) 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. [6]
- May 27 – F. Scott Fitzgerald's 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". [7]
- 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, [8] 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 (1925) 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 (probably) 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. [9]
- 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" (The Advent of the Delightful Mother) 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" (বিদ্রোহী, The Rebel, December 1921) 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 (Trommeln in der Nacht), 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 . [2] 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" (published July 1923), the groundwork of the novel Mrs Dalloway (1925).
- 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" (Red Apples from the Trees of Pain).
- 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. [10]
- 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. [11]
- 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 (1921). [12]
