1907 in literature

This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1907.

Events

• Early – 7-year-old Elizabeth Bowen moves with her mother from Ireland to the south of England.
• January 3 – National Theatre opens in Sofia, Bulgaria.
• January 26 – Large sections of the audience boo the opening performance of J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. Disturbances continue for a week.^[1]
• February 4 – In a public debate at the Abbey Theatre, the poet W. B. Yeats denies trying to suppress audience distaste during a performance of The Playboy of the Western World.
• March – The Diamond Sūtra, a woodblock printed Buddhist scripture dated 868, is discovered by Aurel Stein at the Mogao Caves, near Dunhuang in China; it is "the earliest complete survival of a dated printed book".^[2]
• March–April – Virginia Woolf and others of the Stephen family move within London's Bloomsbury to 29 Fitzroy Square (a former home of George Bernard Shaw).
• April 17 – August Strindberg's A Dream Play ("Ett drömspel", 1901) receives its first performance, at the Swedish Theatre (Stockholm) with his ex-wife Harriet Bosse in the leading rôle.
• April 23 – Jack and Charmian London sail out of San Francisco Bay on a yacht to begin the voyage described in The Cruise of the Snark (1911).
• May–September – Kenneth Grahame writes the letters to his son that are the basis for The Wind in the Willows (1908).
• May – British publishers Thomas Nelson and William Collins, Sons (as "Books for the million") launch cheap hardback in-copyright imprints.
• May 15 – American humorist Gelett Burgess coins the term blurb for promotional text on a book-jacket.^[3][4]
• June 26 – Mark Twain receives an honorary doctorate of laws degree from the University of Oxford in England.
• September 7 – Gaston Leroux's pioneering locked room mystery The Mystery of the Yellow Room (Le mystère de la chambre jaune) begins serialization in L'Illustration (Paris).
• Autumn – James Joyce tutors Ettore Schmitz in English at Trieste. Schmitz later becomes well-known under the name Italo Svevo.
• Deluxe edition of Margarete Böhme's Tagebuch einer Verlorenen published in Berlin, marking 100,000 copies in print.
• Thomas Mofolo's Moeti oa bochabela ("The Traveler of the East"), the first work of literature in the Sotho language, is published.
• Hélène van Zuylen leaves her partner Renée Vivien for another woman. Vivien's volume of love poetry Flambeaux éteints ("Extinguished Torches") is published this year.^[5]
• Éditions Grasset established in Paris.

New books

Fiction

• Sholom Aleichem – From Home to America (פֿון דער היים קיין אַמעריקע, Fun der heym keyn amerike), first part of Motl, Peysi the Cantor's Son: The Writings of an Orphan Boy (מאָטל פּייסי דעם חזנס; כתבֿים פֿון אַ ייִנגל אַ יתום, Motl peysi dem khazns: ksovim fun a yingl a yosem)
• Guillaume Apollinaire – Les Onze Mille Verges
• Arnold Bennett -The City of Pleasure
• André Billy – Benoni
• Mary Elizabeth Braddon – Dead Love Has Chains
• Joseph Conrad – The Secret Agent
• Charles Derennes – Le Peuple du Pôle
• Jeffery Farnol – My Lady Caprice
• E. M. Forster – The Longest Journey
• Elinor Glyn – Three Weeks
• William Dean Howells – Through the Eye of the Needle
• Gaston Leroux – The Mystery of the Yellow Room
• Liu E (劉鶚) – The Travels of Lao Can (老殘遊記, Lao Ts'an yu-chi)
• Arthur Machen – The Hill of Dreams
• Octave Mirbeau – La 628-E8
• Baroness Orczy
  • Beau Brocade
  • The Tangled Skein
• Ferdynand Antoni Ossendowski – V ludskoi pyli (In Human Dust)
• Upton Sinclair – The Overman
• Edith Wharton – Madame de Treymes
• Owen Wister – The Seven Ages of Washington
• P. G. Wodehouse – Not George Washington
• Harold Bell Wright – The Shepherd of the Hills

Children and young people

• L. Frank Baum
  • Father Goose's Year Book
  • Ozma of Oz
  • Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad (as Edith Van Dyne)
  • Policeman Bluejay (as Laura Bancroft)
• E. Nesbit – The Enchanted Castle
• Beatrix Potter – The Tale of Tom Kitten

Drama

• Leonid Andreyev – The Life of Man
• Jacinto Benavente – Los intereses creados (The Bonds of Interest)
• Georges Feydeau – A Flea in Her Ear (La Puce à l'oreille)
• Agha Hashar Kashmiri – Safed Khoon (adaptation of King Lear)
• Thomas Mann – Fiorenza
• John Masefield – The Campden Wonder
• George Ranetti – Romeo și Julietta la Mizil
• John Millington Synge – The Playboy of the Western World
• Teffi – The Woman Question (published)

Poetry

• James Elroy Flecker – The Bridge of Fire
• Robert W. Service – The Songs of a Sourdough

Non-fiction

• Edmund Gosse – Father and Son
• John Millington Synge – The Aran Islands
• George Witton – Scapegoats of the Empire

Births

• February 1 – Günter Eich, German lyricist (died 1972)
• February 3 (probable date) – James A. Michener, American novelist (died 1997)
• February 21 – W. H. Auden, English poet (died 1973)
• March 13 – Mircea Eliade, Romanian writer (died 1986)
• May 12 – Leslie Charteris, Singapore-born Chinese-British genre novelist (died 1993)
• May 13 – Daphne du Maurier, English writer (died 1989)
• May 27 – Rachel Carson, American environmentalist and author (died 1964)
• June 14 – René Char, French poet (died 1988)
• July 7 – Robert A. Heinlein, American author (died 1988)
• August 12 – Miguel Torga, Portuguese author (died 1995)
• August 17 – Roger Peyrefitte, French author (died 2000)
• August 28 – Rupert Hart-Davis, English editor and publisher (died 1999)
• September 23 – Pauline Réage, French erotic novelist (died 1998)
• October 15 – Varian Fry, American journalist (died 1967)
• October 18 – Mihail Sebastian, Romanian Jewish playwright, essayist, and novelist (died 1945)
• November 14 – Astrid Lindgren, Swedish author of children's books (died 2002)
• November 27 – L. Sprague de Camp, American science fiction and fantasy author (died 2000)
• November 28
  • Alberto Moravia, Italian novelist (died 1990)
  • Mary Oppen, American poet, activist and photographer (died 1990)
• December 10 – Rumer Godden, English novelist (died 1998)
• December 18 – Christopher Fry, English dramatist (died 2005)
• Unknown date – E. J. Scovell, English poet (died 1999)

Deaths

• January 20 – Agnes Mary Clerke, English author on astronomy (born 1842)
• March 9 – Frederic George Stephens, English critic and member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (born 1828)
• March 19 – Thomas Bailey Aldrich, American poet and novelist (born 1836)
• April 23 – André Theuriet, French poet and novelist (born 1833)
• May 12 – Joris-Karl Huysmans, French author (born 1848)
• July 17 – Hector Malot, French author (born 1830)
• July 19 – William Gunion Rutherford, Scottish classicist (born 1853)
• August 10 – Marko Vovchok, Ukrainian novelist and short story writer (born 1833)^[6]
• August 25 – Mary Elizabeth Coleridge, English novelist and poet (appendicitis complications, born 1861)
• September 6 – Sully Prudhomme, French poet and essayist; 1st Nobel Prize winner (born 1839)
• September 7 – Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu, Romanian philologist (born 1836)
• September 8 – Iosif Vulcan, Romanian poet, playwright and novelist (born 1841)
• October 6 – David Masson, Scottish critic and biographer (born 1822)
• November 1 – Alfred Jarry, French dramatist (tuberculosis, born 1873)
• November 28 – Stanisław Wyspiański, Polish dramatist, poet and painter (born 1869)

Awards

• Nobel Prize for Literature: Rudyard Kipling

References