1918 in literature

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This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1918.

Events

• January 1 – Popular British novelist and wartime propagandist Hall Caine is made a KBE.
• January 2 – Popular British novelist Marie Corelli is convicted under wartime legislation for hoarding food.
• January 23 – Robert Graves marries the painter Nancy Nicholson in London. Wedding guests include Wilfred Owen, who will be killed by the end of the year, and whose first nationally published poem appears 3 days later ("Miners" in The Nation).
• March
  • The Telemachus episode of James Joyce's Ulysses is published (in serialised form) in the American journal The Little Review.
  • English novelist Alec Waugh is made a prisoner of war; he will be incarcerated in Mainz Citadel with monologuist J. Milton Hayes (also taken prisoner this year) and Hugh Kingsmill.
• April
  • Hu Shih, chief advocate of the use of the vernacular in Chinese literature at this time, publishes an essay, "Constructive Literary Revolution – A Literature of National Speech" in the magazine New Youth (Xin Qingnian) proposing a four-point reform program.
  • English writer 'May Sinclair' first uses the term "Stream of consciousness" to describe a narrative mode, in a discussion of Dorothy Richardson's novel sequence Pilgrimage in The Egoist.
• May 3 – Katherine Mansfield marries her long-time partner John Middleton Murry at Kensington register office in London.
• June – English poet Basil Bunting is imprisoned as a conscientious objector.
• August 17 – Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon meet for the last time, in London, and spend what Sassoon later describes as "the whole of a hot cloudless afternoon together."
• October 3 – Siegfried Sassoon visits his mentor Robbie Ross for the last time. Sassoon later writes that Ross, in saying goodbye, gave him a "presentiment of final farewell."
• November 4 – Wilfred Owen is killed in action, aged 25, at the Sambre–Oise Canal with only five of his poems published. News of his death reaches his parents in Shrewsbury a week later on Armistice Day. He is awarded a posthumous Military Cross a year later.
• December – The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (d. 1889; including The Wreck of the Deutschland, 1875/6) are published by Robert Bridges; few were published in Hopkins's lifetime, so this presents his innovative sprung rhythm and imagery to many readers for the first time.
• December 28 – Emperor Khải Định of Vietnam declares the traditional Chữ nôm script for writing the Vietnamese language to be abolished in favour of the Latin script Vietnamese alphabet.
• Winter – Parisian farceur Georges Feydeau contracts tertiary syphilis.
• The 2nd annual Pulitzer Prizes are awarded in the United States, including the first award for a novel.

U.S. poster

New books

Fiction

• Ryūnosuke Akutagawa – "Hell Screen" (short stories)
• Arnold Bennett – The Roll-Call
• Willa Cather – My Ántonia
• Blaise Cendrars
  • I Have Killed (J'ai tué)
  • The Severed Hand (La main coupée)
• Marie Corelli – The Young Diana
• Alfred Döblin – Wadzeks Kampf mit der Dampfturbine (Wadzek's Struggle with the Steam Turbine)
• Sarah Lee Brown Fleming – Hope's Highway
• Mary E. Wilkins Freeman – Edgewater People
• August Gailit – Muinasmaa
• Owen Gregory – Meccania the Super-State
• Thea von Harbou – Das indische Grabmal
• Wyndham Lewis – Tarr (in book form)
• Brinsley MacNamara (John Weldon writing as Oliver Blyth) – The Valley of the Squinting Windows
• Heinrich Mann – Der Untertan
• Frans Masereel – 25 Images of a Man's Passion (wordless novel)
• André Maurois – Les Silences du Colonel Bramble
• George Moore – A Story-Teller's Holiday
• Baroness Orczy
  • Flower o' the Lily
  • The Man in Grey
• Leo Perutz – From Nine to Nine (Zwischen neun und neun, originally Freiheit)
• Romain Rolland – Colas Breugnon
• Junichiro Tanizaki (谷崎 潤一郎) – Gold and Silver (金と銀)
• Booth Tarkington – The Magnificent Ambersons
• Mary Augusta Ward – The War and Elizabeth
• Rebecca West – The Return of the Soldier
• Edith Wharton – The Marne

Children and young people

• Edgar Rice Burroughs – Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar
• Johnny Gruelle – Raggedy Ann Stories
• Norman Lindsay – The Magic Pudding: Being The Adventures of Bunyip Bluegum and his friends Bill Barnacle and Sam Sawnoff
• Ferenc Móra – Kincskereső kisködmön (A Fortune-Hunting Little Frock Coat)

Drama

• Bertolt Brecht – Baal (written)
• John Drinkwater – Abraham Lincoln
• Marcel Gerbidon and Paul Armont – School for Coquettes (L'École des cocottes)
• Susan Glaspell – Tickless Time
• Hugo von Hofmannsthal – The Difficult Man
• James Joyce – Exiles
• Georg Kaiser – Gas
• Gregorio Martínez Sierra – Sueño de Una Noche de Agosto (Dream of an August Night)
• Vladimir Mayakovsky – Mystery-Bouffe (Мистерия-Буфф, Misteriya-Buff)
• Emma Orczy (Baroness Orczy) – The Legion of Honour (adaptation of A Sheaf of Bluebells)
• Luigi Pirandello
  • But It's Nothing Serious (Ma non è una cosa seria)
  • The Rules of the Game (Il giuoco delle parti, literally "The Game of Rôles")

Poetry

Main article: 1918 in poetry

• Guillaume Apollinaire – Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War, 1913-1916
• Laurence Binyon – The New World: Poems
• Vera Brittain – Verses of a VAD
• Toirdhealbhach Mac Suibhne (Terence MacSwiney) – Battle-cries
• Walter de la Mare – The Marionettes
• Siegfried Sassoon – Counter-Attack and Other Poems
• Edward Thomas (posthumous) – Last Poems
• Tristan Tzara – Vingt-cinq poèmes

Non-fiction

• Henry Adams – The Education of Henry Adams
• Enid Bagnold – A Diary Without Dates
• Clive Bell – Pot-boilers
• Laurence Binyon – For Dauntless France
• William Inge – The Philosophy of Plotinus
• Daniel Jones – An Outline of English Phonetics
• Federico García Lorca – Impressiones y Paisajes (Impressions and Landscapes)
• Walther Rathenau – An Deutschlands Jugend
• Oswald Spengler – The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes)
• Dr Marie Stopes
  • Married Love
  • Wise Parenthood
• Lytton Strachey – Eminent Victorians
• Mary Augusta Ward – A Writer's Recollections

Births

• January 16
  • Stirling Silliphant, American writer, producer (died 1996)
  • Philip José Farmer, American science fiction writer (died 2009)
• February 1 – Muriel Spark, Scottish novelist (died 2006)
• February 6 – Lothar-Günther Buchheim, German novelist, war correspondent and painter (died 2007)
• March 9 – Mickey Spillane, American mystery writer (died 2006)
• March 10 – Theodore Cogswell, American science fiction author (died 1987)
• March 15 – Richard Ellmann, American literary biographer (died 1987)
• April 23
  • Maurice Druon, French historical novelist (died 2009)
  • James Kirkup, English poet (died 2009)
• May 16 – Juan Rulfo, Mexican author (died 1986)
• July 9 – John Heath-Stubbs, English poet and translator (died 2006)
• July 14 – Arthur Laurents, American novelist and screenwriter (died 2011)
• August 9 – Robert Aldrich, American writer and filmmaker (died 1983)
• August 20 – Jacqueline Susann, American novelist (died 1974)
• September 19 – Penelope Mortimer, Welsh-born English novelist and biographer (died 1999)
• October 19 – Louis Althusser, French Marxist philosopher (died 1990)
• October 29 – Ștefan Baciu, Romanian and Brazilian poet, novelist and literary promoter (died 1993)
• November 2 – Roger Lancelyn Green, English biographer (died 1987)
• November 16 – Nicholas Moore, English poet (died 1986)
• November 25 – Peter Opie, English writer on children's literature and lore (died 1982)
• November 29 – Madeleine L'Engle, American writer for children and teens (died 2007)
• December 11 – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Russian novelist (died 2008)
• December 30 – Al Purdy, Canadian poet (died 2000)

Deaths

• January 1 – William Wilfred Campbell, Canadian poet (born 1860)
• January 6 – Dora Sigerson Shorter, Irish poet, novelist and sculptor (born 1866)
• January 28 – John McCrae, Canadian military surgeon and war poet (pneumonia, born 1872)
• April 1 – Isaac Rosenberg, English poet and artist (killed in action, born 1890)
• April – William Hope Hodgson, English author and essayist (killed in action, born 1877)
• May 8 – Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg, Austrian writer and traveler (born 1851)
• May 27 – Francis George Fowler, English grammarian (tuberculosis contracted on military service, born 1871)
• June 10 – Arrigo Boito (Tobia Gorio), Italian poet and composer (born 1842)
• June 26 – Peter Rosegger, Austrian poet (born 1843)
• June 28 – Alexander Turnbull, New Zealand bibliophile (born 1868)
• July 30 – Joyce Kilmer, American poet (killed in action, born 1886)
• October 5 – Robbie Ross, journalist (heart failure, born 1869)
• November 4
  • Wilfred Owen, English poet (killed in action, born 1893)
  • Andrew Dickson White, American diplomat and author (born 1832)
• November 9 – Guillaume Apollinaire, French poet, dramatist, novelist and critic (influenza, born 1880)
• November 24 – Annie Hall Cudlip, English novelist, journalist and editor (born 1838)
• December 1 – Margit Kaffka, Hungarian novelist, short story writer and poet (born 1880)
• December 2 – Edmond Rostand, French poet and dramatist (influenza, born 1868)
• December 15 – Salvatore Farina, Italian novelist (born 1846)

Awards

• Nobel Prize for Literature: not awarded
• Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Jesse Lynch Williams, Why Marry?
• Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Sara Teasdale: Love Songs
• Pulitzer Prize for the Novel: Ernest Poole – His Family

In literature

• The following novels relate to the end of World War I:
  • Pat Barker – The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road (1993–1995)
  • Alfred Döblin – November 1918 (1939–1950)
  • Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu – Yaban ("The Strange", 1932)
  • Thomas Keneally – Gossip from the Forest (1975)
• R. C. Sherriff's drama Journey's End (1928) is set on the Western Front (World War I) March 18–21
• Sjón's novel Moonstone – The Boy Who Never Was (Mánasteinn – drengurinn sem aldrei var til, 2013) is set this autumn, referencing the 1918 flu pandemic and eruption of the Katla volcano
• According to Stephenie Meyer's novel Twilight, Edward Cullen is turned into a vampire to prevent him from dying in the 1918 flu pandemic in Chicago