1914 in literature

Events

• January 18 – A party held in honor of English poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt at his stud farm in West Sussex brings together W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Thomas Sturge Moore, Victor Plarr, Richard Aldington, F. S. Flint and Frederic Manning. Peacock is on the menu.
• February–December – Publication of New Numbers, a quarterly collection of work by the Dymock poets in England edited by Lascelles Abercrombie.
• February 2 – James Joyce's semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man commences serialization in The Egoist, a new London literary magazine founded by Dora Marsden.
• February 4 – A staging of George A. Birmingham's comedy General John Regan at Westport Town Hall in Ireland provokes a riot.
• February 10 – Thomas Hardy marries his second wife, the children's author Florence Dugdale, at St Andrew's, Enfield.
• March
• *The Times Literary Supplement is published separately for the first time.
• *The Little Review is founded by Margaret Caroline Anderson as part of Chicago's literary renaissance.
• March 4 – Irish-born novelist George Moore publishes Vale, the final of his 3-volume autobiographical Hail and Farewell.
• April 11 – The first English-language performance of George Bernard Shaw's comedy Pygmalion at His Majesty's Theatre is given in London starring Mrs. Patrick Campbell and Herbert Beerbohm Tree, and famously including the Act III line "Not bloody likely!".
• June – James Joyce's Dubliners, a collection of fifteen short stories depicting the Irish middle classes in and around Dublin during the early 20th century, is published in London.
• June 20 – The first issue appears of the Vorticist literary magazine BLAST edited by Wyndham Lewis. It includes Ford Madox Hueffer's "The Saddest Story", a preliminary version of The Good Soldier.
• June 24 – Edward Thomas makes the English railway journey which inspires his poem "Adlestrop" while traveling to meet Robert Frost; Thomas begins writing poetry for the first time after this summer.
• July
• *E. M. Forster completes his novel Maurice, with its theme of male homosexual love; it is not published until 1971.
• *Heinrich Mann completes his novel Der Untertan, with its critique of German nationalism; it is not published until 1918.
• August
• *The literature of World War I makes its first appearance. John Masefield writes the poem "August, 1914", the last he will produce before the peace.
• *Stanley Unwin purchases a controlling interest in the London publisher George Allen.
• *At about this date Loughborough publishers Wills & Hepworth publish their first illustrated children's books in the Ladybird series, Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales by E Talbot and Tiny Tots Travels by M. Burridge.
• August 25 – The library of the Catholic University of Leuven is set on fire by German troops during the Rape of Belgium.
• September – J. R. R. Tolkien writes a poem about Eärendil, the first appearance of his mythopoeic Middle-earth legendarium. Eärendil will much later appear in The Silmarillion. At this time Tolkien is an Oxford undergraduate staying at Phoenix Farm, Gedling, near Nottingham.
• September 2 – Charles Masterman invites 25 "eminent literary men" to Wellington House in London to form a secret British War Propaganda Bureau. Those who attend include William Archer, Arnold Bennett, Hall Caine, G. K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ford Madox Hueffer, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, John Masefield, Henry Newbolt, Gilbert Parker, G. M. Trevelyan and H. G. Wells. Kipling soon afterwards writes the poem "For all we have and are". W. B. Yeats, however, refuses to sign a letter of support for the War signed by most of the participants and published in The Times on September 18.
• September 9 – Hilaire Belloc is contracted to write regular articles on the War in the new British weekly Land and Water.
• September 21 – Laurence Binyon's poem "For the Fallen", containing his "Ode of Remembrance", is published in The Times.
• September 22
• *French novelist Alain-Fournier, aged 27, is killed in action near Vaux-lès-Palameix a month after enlisting, leaving his second novel, Colombe Blanchet, unfinished; his body will not be identified until 1991.
• *T. S. Eliot meets fellow American poet Ezra Pound for the first time, in London.
• September 29 – Arthur Machen's short story "The Bowmen", origin of the legend of the Angels of Mons, is published in The Evening News.
• October 2 – The date predicted by Charles Taze Russell, founder of the Watchtower Society, as the date for the "full end" of Babylon, or nominal Christianity, with statements such as: "True, it is expecting great things to claim, as we do, that within the coming twenty-six years all present governments will be overthrown and dissolved.... In view of this strong Bible evidence concerning the Times of the Gentiles, we consider it an established truth that the final end of the kingdoms of this world, and the full establishment of the Kingdom of God, will be accomplished at the end of A. D. 1914...."
• November 7 – The first issue of The New Republic magazine is published in the United States.
• November 16 – M. P. Shiel is convicted and imprisoned for "indecently assaulting and carnally knowing" his 12-year-old de facto stepdaughter on October 26 in London.
• December – Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky, who writes under the pen name "Guillaume Apollinaire", enlists in the French Army to fight in World War I and becomes a French citizen after an August attempt at enlistment is rejected.
• December 31 – T. S. Eliot writes to Conrad Aiken from Oxford, saying: "I hate university towns and university people, who are the same everywhere, with pregnant wives, sprawling children, many books and hideous pictures on the walls.... Oxford is very pretty, but I don't like to be dead."

  New books

Fiction

• Ion Agârbiceanu – Arhanghelii
• Arnold Bennett – The Price of Love
• E. F. Benson – Arundel
• Rhoda Broughton – Concerning a Vow
• Mary Grant Bruce
• *From Billabong to London
• *Grays Hollow
• G. K. Chesterton – The Flying Inn
• Dikran Chökürian – Vanke
• Marie Corelli –
• Miguel de Unamuno
• *Niebla
• *Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho
• Ethel M. Dell – The Rocks of Valpré
• Theodore Dreiser – The Titan
• Edna Ferber – Personality Plus
• James Elroy Flecker – The King of Alsander
• Anatole France – La Révolte des anges
• André Gide – :fr:Les Caves du Vatican|Les Caves du Vatican
• Elinor Glyn – Letters to Caroline
• Nathaniel Gould – A Gamble for Love
• John MacDougall Hay – Gillespie
• Hermann Hesse – Rosshalde
• James Joyce – Dubliners
• D. H. Lawrence – The Prussian Officer and Other Stories
• Stephen Leacock – Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
• Ada Leverson – Birds of Paradise
• Sinclair Lewis – Our Mr. Wrenn
• Harold MacGrath – The Adventures of Kathlyn
• Compton Mackenzie – Sinister Street, vol. 2
• Natsume Sōseki – Kokoro
• Frank Norris – Vandover and the Brute
• Baroness Orczy
• *The Laughing Cavalier
• *Unto Cæsar
• Eleanor H. Porter – Miss Billy Married
• Raymond Roussel – Locus Solus
• Berta Ruck – His Official Fiancée
• Saki – Beasts and Super-Beasts
• Paul Scheerbart – Das graue Tuch und zehn Prozent Weiß: Ein Damenroman
• Henri Stahl – Un român în lună
• Booth Tarkington – Penrod
• Robert Tressell – The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists
• Mary Augusta Ward – Delia Blanchflower
• H. G. Wells – The World Set Free
• P. G. Wodehouse – The Man Upstairs
• Francis Brett Young – Deep Sea

  Children and young people

• L. Frank Baum
• *Tik-Tok of Oz
• *Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West
• Edgar Rice Burroughs – Tarzan of the Apes
• Elsie J. Oxenham – Girls of the Hamlet Club

  Drama