1901 in literature
This article presents lists of literary events and publications in 1901.
Events
- January 31 – Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters opens at the Moscow Art Theatre, directed by Constantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko with Stanislavski as Vershinin, Olga Knipper as Masha, Margarita Savetskaya as Olga, Maria Andreyeva as Irina, and Maria Lilina as Natasha.
- February 22 – Leo Tolstoy is excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church.
- May 6 – Swedish dramatist August Strindberg, 52, marries his third wife, the Swedish-Norwegian actress Harriet Bosse, 23, after an engagement in March during rehearsals for his play Easter .
- May 25 – Chekhov marries Olga Knipper in a quiet ceremony.
- May 28 – Cherry v. Des Moines Leader is decided in the Iowa Supreme Court, upholding the right to publish critical reviews.
- June 28 – G. K. Chesterton marries Frances Blogg at St Mary Abbots, Kensington.
- July – The first modern performances of Everyman, the 15th-century morality play, are given by William Poel's Elizabethan Stage Society outdoors at the Charterhouse in London.
- July 24 – O. Henry is released from prison in Columbus, Ohio after serving three years for embezzlement.
- October
- *Thomas Mann's first novel, Buddenbrooks, is published in Berlin.
- *The Irish Literary Theatre project gives its final performance.
- October 23 – Mark Twain receives an honorary doctorate of literature from Yale University. In the same month he moves to Riverdale, New York.
- December 2 – The Romanian literary review Sămănătorul is founded.
- December 10 – The first Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded, to French poet Sully Prudhomme.
- unknown date – World's Classics series of publications is founded by Grant Richards in England.
New books
Fiction
- Ignacio Manuel Altamirano – El Zarco
- Leonid Andreyev – «повести»
- René Boylesve – La Becquée
- Samuel Butler – Erewhon Revisited
- Hall Caine – The Eternal City
- Winston Churchill – The Crisis
- Colette – Claudine à Paris
- Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford – The Inheritors
- Victoria Cross – Anna Lombard
- Patrick S. Dinneen – Cormac Ó Conaill
- George Douglas – The House with the Green Shutters
- Miles Franklin – My Brilliant Career
- Géza Gárdonyi – A láthatatlan ember
- Henry James – The Sacred Fount
- Johannes V. Jensen – The Fall of the King
- Rudyard Kipling – Kim
- Jean Lorrain
- *Monsieur de Phocas
- *Le Vice errant
- George Barr McCutcheon – Graustark: The Story of a Love Behind a Throne
- Thomas Mann – Buddenbrooks
- George Moore – Sister Theresa
- Frank Norris – The Octopus
- Charles-Louis Philippe – Bubu de Montparnasse
- Luigi Pirandello – L'Esclusa
- Liane de Pougy – Idylle Saphique
- José Maria de Eça de Queiroz – A Cidade e as Serras
- M. P. Shiel
- *Lord of the Sea
- *The Purple Cloud
- Bram Stoker and Valdimar Ásmundsson – Makt Myrkranna
- Rabindranath Tagore – Nastanirh
- William Alexander Taylor – Intermere
- Jules Verne
- *The Sea Serpent
- *The Village in the Treetops
- H. G. Wells – The First Men in the Moon
- Émile Zola – Travail
Children and young people
- John Kendrick Bangs – Mr. Munchausen
- L. Frank Baum
- *American Fairy Tales
- *The Master Key
- *Dot and Tot of Merryland
- Evelyn Everett-Green – True Stories of Girl Heroines
Drama
- Gabriele D'Annunzio – Francesca da Rimini
- J. M. Barrie – Quality Street
- Roberto Bracco – Lost in the Dark
- Hall Caine – The Eternal City
- Anton Chekhov – Three Sisters
- Clyde Fitch – The Climbers
- Haralamb Lecca – Quinta. Suprema forță
- Wilhelm Meyer-Förster – Old Heidelberg
- August Strindberg – A Dream Play
- Stanisław Wyspiański
- *:pl:Warszawianka |Warszawianka
- *The Wedding
Poetry
- Henry Ames Blood – Selected Poems of Henry Ames Blood
- Maxim Gorky – The Song of the Stormy Petrel
- Thomas Hardy – Poems of the Past and the Present
- Akiko Yosano – Midaregami
Non-fiction
- Annie Besant, Charles Webster Leadbeater – Thought-Forms: A Record of Clairvoyant Investigation
- Sigmund Freud – The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
- Seebohm Rowntree – Poverty, A Study of Town Life
- Edith Helen Sichel – Women and Men of the French Renaissance
- Rudolf Steiner – Die Mystik im Aufgange des neuzeitlichen Geisteslebens, und ihr Verhältnis zur modernen Weltan-schauung
- A. E. Waite – The Life of Louis Claude de Saint-Martin
- Booker T. Washington – Up from Slavery
- H. G. Wells – Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought
Births
- January 31 – Marie Luise Kaschnitz, German story writer, novelist and poet
- February 13 – Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Scottish novelist
- February 23 – Ivar Lo-Johansson, Swedish novelist and journalist
- March 4 – Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, Malagasy Francophone poet
- April 10 – Anna Kavan, French-born English novelist and short story writer
- May 1 – Antal Szerb, Hungarian writer
- May 15 – Xavier Herbert, Australian novelist
- June 1 – John Van Druten, English-born American dramatist
- June 23 – Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Turkish novelist and essayist
- July 9 – Barbara Cartland, English romantic novelist, historian and playwright
- July 20 – Dilys Powell, English film critic
- July 25 – Ruth Krauss, American children's author and poet
- August 10 – Sergio Frusoni, Cape Verde poet and promoter of Cape Verdean Creole language
- August 17 – Heðin Brú, Faroese fiction writer and translator
- August 20 – Salvatore Quasimodo, Italian author
- November 3 – André Malraux, French author
- November 4 – Ernest Elmore, English crime writer and theatre director
- December 9 – Ödön von Horváth, Austro-Hungarian dramatist and novelist
- December 16 – Margaret Mead, American anthropologist and author
Deaths
- January 14 – Víctor Balaguer, Catalan Spanish dramatist and poet
- February 2 – John Cordy Jeaffreson, English novelist and non-fiction writer
- February 15 – Maurice Thompson, American novelist
- March 19 – Philippe Gille, French dramatist
- March 24 – Charlotte Mary Yonge, English novelist
- April 6 – George Murray Smith, English publisher
- April 12 – Louis Auguste Sabatier, French theologian
- June 5 – Dagny Juel, Norwegian writer and artists' model
- June 9 – Walter Besant, English novelist and historian
- June 10 – Robert Williams Buchanan, Scottish poet, novelist and dramatist
- July 7 – Johanna Spyri, Swiss children's writer
- July 18 – Jan ten Brink, Dutch novelist
- July 20 – William Cosmo Monkhouse, English poet and critic
- July 27 – Brooke Foss Westcott, English theologian
- August 9 – Vishnudas Bhave, Indian dramatist
- October 31 – Julien Leclercq, French Symbolist poet and art critic
- November 6 – Kate Greenaway, English children's illustrator and writer
Awards
- Nobel Prize for Literature: Sully Prudhomme