1917 in literature

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The year 1917 in literature involved some significant events and new books.

Events

• January - Francis Picabia produces the first issue of the Dada periodical 391 in Barcelona.
• June 4 - The first Pulitzer Prizes are awarded: Laura E. Richards, Maude H. Elliott, and Florence Hall receive the first Pulitzer for a biography (for Julia Ward Howe). Jean Jules Jusserand receives the first Pulitzer for history for his work With Americans of Past and Present Days. Herbert B. Swope receives the first Pulitzer for journalism for his work for the New York World.
• July - Siegfried Sassoon issues his "Soldier's Declaration" and is sent by the military authorities to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, where on August 17 Wilfred Owen introduces himself.
• December 25 - Why Marry?, first dramatic play to win a Pulitzer Prize, opens at the Astor Theatre in New York City.
• The Hogarth Press is founded by Leonard and Virginia Woolf.
• J.R.R. Tolkien begins writing The Book of Lost Tales (the first version of The Silmarillion); thus Middle-earth is first chronicled.

New books

• Henri Barbusse — Under Fire
• Adrien Bertrand — L'Orage sur le jardin de Candide
• Rhoda Broughton — A Thorn in the Flesh
• Edgar Rice Burroughs
  • A Princess of Mars
  • The Son of Tarzan
• Abraham Cahan — The Rise of David Levinsky
• Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay - Devdas
• Mary Cholmondeley — Under One Roof
• Joseph Conrad - The Shadow Line (in book form)
• Clemence Dane - Regiment of Women
• Norman Douglas — South Wind
• Arthur Conan Doyle — His Last Bow (collected stories)
• George Washington Ellis — The Leopard's Claw
• Zona Gale — A Daughter of the Morning
• Joseph Hergesheimer — The Three Black Pennys
• Ricarda Huch — The Deruga Case
• Henry James (posthumously)
  • The Ivory Tower
  • The Sense of the Past
• Sinclair Lewis — Knights of Araby
• Oscar Micheaux — The Homesteader
• Lucy Maud Montgomery - Anne's House of Dreams
• Baroness Orczy
  • Lord Tony's Wife
  • A Sheaf of Bluebells
• David Graham Phillips — Susan Lenox: Her Rise and Fall
• Marmaduke Pickthall — The Job
• Ernest Poole — His Family
• Horacio Quiroga — Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte
• Elizabeth von Arnim — Christine
• Mary Augusta Ward
  • Missing
  • Towards the Goal
• Edith Wharton — Summer
• P. G. Wodehouse
  • The Man with Two Left Feet (collected stories)
  • Piccadilly Jim

New drama

• Guillaume Apollinaire - The Breasts of Tiresias (first performed)
• Ferdinand Bruckner - Der Herr in den Nebeln
• Jean Cocteau - Parade
• Georg Kaiser - The Corals
• A. A. Milne - Wurzel-Flummery
• Luigi Pirandello - Right You Are If You Think You Are
• Jesse Lynch Williams - Why Marry?

Poetry

• Lascelles Abercrombie - Emblems Of Love
• T. S. Eliot - Prufrock, and other observations
• Robert Graves - Fairies and Fusiliers
• Ivor Gurney - Severn and Somme
• Siegfried Sassoon - The Old Huntsman, and Other Poems
• William Watson - The Man Who Saw: and Other Poems Arising out of the War
• W. B. Yeats - The Wild Swans at Coole, Other Verses and a Play in Verse

Non-fiction

• Clayton Adams — Ethiopia, The Land of Promise
• Max Aitken — Canada at Flanders
• Daniel Jones – An English Pronouncing Dictionary
• D'Arcy Thompson — On Growth and Form

Births

• February 11 - Sidney Sheldon, novelist (died 2007)
• February 25 - Anthony Burgess, British novelist (died 1993)
• March 1 - Robert Lowell, American poet (died 1977)
• March 17 - Carlo Cassola, Italian novelist (died 1987)
• April 9 - Johannes Bobrowski, German author (died 1965)
• June 16 - Katharine Graham, journalist (died 2001)
• October 24 - Denys Val Baker, Welsh writer (died 1984)
• November 3 - Conor Cruise O'Brien, Irish biographer and political writer (died 2008)
• December 21 - Heinrich Böll, German author, Nobel Prize winner (died 1985)

Deaths

• January 15 - William de Morgan, novelist
• February 16 - Octave Mirbeau, novelist and critic
• April 9
  • Edward Thomas, poet and prose writer
  • R. E. Vernède, war poet
• April 14 - L. L. Zamenhof, creator of Esperanto
• April 21 - Francis Burnand, dramatist and editor of "Punch"
• July 31 - Francis Ledwidge, war poet
• July 31 - Hedd Wyn, Welsh-language poet
• November 15 - Émile Durkheim, sociologist
• November 18 - Adrien Bertrand, French novelist
• December 15 - Lady Anne Blunt, descendant of Lord Byron and wife of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

Awards

• Nobel Prize for Literature: Karl Adolph Gjellerup, Henrik Pontoppidan