1913 in literature

Events

January – Acmeist poetry, whose roots lead back to 1909, is officially born as a reaction against Russian Futurism. Manifestos are printed in the journal Apollon by Nikolay Gumilyov and Sergey Gorodetsky, with illustrative works by both, as well as by Anna Akhmatova, Vladimir Narbut, and Osip Mandelstam—the latter with "Hagia Sophia".

January 1 – German National Library established in Leipzig.

January 8 – Harold Monro founds the Poetry Bookshop in London; it becomes a significant literary meeting-place.

April 5 – Serialization of the adventures of Gaston Leroux's character Chéri-Bibi begins in Le Matin (France).

April – Bernhard Kellermann's novel Der Tunnel is published, selling 100,000 copies in the following six months.

c. April – Humphrey S. Milford becomes publisher to the University of Oxford and head of the London operations of Oxford University Press following the retirement of Henry Frowde.

September – F. Scott Fitzgerald enters Princeton University where he meets Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop.

November 8 – Georg Büchner's play Woyzeck, left unfinished at the writer's death in 1837, receives its first performance, at the Residenztheater, Munich.

November 13 – Marcel Proust's Swann's Way (Du côté de chez Swann), vol. 1 of In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu), is published by Éditions Grasset in Paris at the author's expense.

December 13 – Ambrose Bierce, accompanying Pancho Villa's army in the Mexican Revolution as an observer, is last heard from.

December 21 – Arthur Wynne's "word-cross", the first crossword puzzle, is published in the New York World.

Husayn Haykal publishes the first modern Egyptian novel, Zaynab.

Norbert von Hellingrath begins publishing Friedrich Hölderlin's complete works (Sämtliche Werke: historisch-kritische Ausgabe, the "Berliner Ausgabe"), restoring his work to literary prominence.

Henri Stahl publishes the excerpts from his novel Un român în lună ("A Romanian on the Moon", republished as a book in 1914), one of the earliest works of Romanian science fiction.

Fiction

Alain-Fournier – Le Grand Meaulnes

Maurice Barrès – The Sacred Hill

Andrei Bely – Petersburg (Петербургъ, Peterburg)

Arnold Bennett – The Regent

E. F. Benson

Dodo's Daughter

Thorley Weir

The Weaker Vessel

Edmund Clerihew Bentley – Trent's Last Case

Algernon Blackwood – A Prisoner in Fairyland

Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić – The Brave Adventures of Lapitch (Čudnovate zgode šegrta Hlapića)

Mary Grant Bruce – Norah of Billabong

John Buchan – The Power-House (serialization)

Edgar Rice Burroughs – The Return of Tarzan

Hall Caine – The Woman Thou Gavest Me

Willa Cather – O Pioneers!

Joseph Conrad – Chance (book publication)

Miguel de Unamuno – El espejo de la muerte (The Mirror of Death, stories)

Arthur Conan Doyle – The Poison Belt

Roger Martin du Gard – Jean Barois

Edna Ferber – Roast Beef, Medium

Ellen Glasgow – Virginia

Elinor Glyn

The Sequence

The Contrast and Other Stories

Knut Hamsun – Børn av Tiden

Husayn Haykal – Zaynab

Franz Hessel – Der Kramladen des Glücks

Henry James – A Small Boy and Others

Annie Fellows Johnston – Miss Santa Clause of the Pullman

Mary Johnston – Hagar

Bernhard Kellermann – Der Tunnel

Valery Larbaud – A. O. Barnabooth

D. H. Lawrence – Sons and Lovers

Jack London

The Valley of the Moon

The Abysmal Brute

Marie Belloc Lowndes – The Lodger

Arnold Lunn – The Harrovians

Compton Mackenzie – Sinister Street, vol. 1

Patricio Mariano – Ang Tala sa Panghulo (The Bright Star at Panghulo)

Flora Mayor – The Third Miss Symons

Oscar Micheaux – Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer

Octave Mirbeau – Dingo

Lucy Maud Montgomery – The Golden Road

Mori Ōgai (森 鷗外) – The Wild Geese (雁, Gan, serialization concludes December)

Baroness Orczy – Eldorado

Luigi Pirandello – I vecchi e i giovani (The Old and the Young, complete)

Marcel Proust – Swann's Way

Sax Rohmer – The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu

Saki – When William Came

Ewald Gerhard Seeliger – Peter Voss, Thief of Millions

Gene Stratton-Porter – Laddie

Booth Tarkington – The Flirt

Vincent Cartwright Vickers – The Google Book

Mary Augusta Ward

The Coryston Family

The Mating of Lydia

Hugh Walpole – Fortitude

Edith Wharton – The Custom of the Country

P. G. Wodehouse – The Little Nugget

Leonard Woolf – The Village in the Jungle

Children and young people

L. Frank Baum

The Patchwork Girl of Oz

Little Wizard Stories of Oz

Aunt Jane's Nieces on the Ranch (as Edith Van Dyne)

Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić – The Brave Adventures of Lapitch (Čudnovate zgode šegrta Hlapića)

Ferenc Móra – Csilicsali Csalavári Csalavér (nonsense title, about a wolf family)

E. Nesbit – Wet Magic

Eleanor H. Porter – Pollyanna

Beatrix Potter – The Tale of Pigling Bland

Drama

Franz Arnold and Ernst Bach - The Spanish Fly

Jacinto Benavente – La malquerida (The Unloved)

Alfred Bronnen – Parricide

Victor Ido – Karinda Adinda

Oskar Luts – Kapsapea (The Cabbage)

Edward Sheldon – Romance

Gregorio Martínez Sierra

Mamá ("Mama")

Sólo para mujeres (For Women Only)

Hans Müller-Schlösser – Schneider Wibbel (Wibbel the Tailor)

Carl Sternheim – Bürger Schippel (Citizen Schippel)

Poetry

Delmira Agustini – Los Cálices Vacíos ("Empty Chalices")

Guillaume Apollinaire – Alcools

James Elroy Flecker – The Golden Journey to Samarkand

Robert Frost – A Boy's Will

Osip Mandelstam – "Hagia Sophia"

Siegfried Sassoon – The Daffodil Murderer

Georg Trakl – Gedichte ("Poems")

Non-fiction

Guillaume Apollinaire – The Cubist Painters, Aesthetic Meditations (Les Peintres Cubistes, Méditations Esthétiques)

Miguel de Unamuno – Del sentimiento trágico de la vida (The Tragic Sense of Life)

Sigmund Freud – Totem und Tabu

Holbrook Jackson – The Eighteen Nineties

Walter Lippmann – A Preface to Politics

Rosa Luxemburg – Die Akkumulation des Kapitals (The Accumulation of Capital, 1951)

Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell – Principia Mathematica (completed)

Births

January 29 – Peter von Zahn, German journalist and writer (died 2001)

February 2 – Racey Helps, English children's writer and illustrator (died 1970)

February 27 – Irwin Shaw, American playwright, screenwriter and novelist (died 1984)

March 2 – Godfried Bomans, Dutch writer (died 1971)

April 18 – Muttathu Varkey, Malayalam novelist, short story writer, and poet (died 1989)

June 22 – Sándor Weöres, Hungarian poet and author (died 1989)

June 26 – Aimé Césaire, Martinique writer (died 2008)

July 6 – Gwyn Thomas, Welsh novelist (died 1981)

July 21 – Catherine Storr, English children's writer (died 2001)

August 11 – Angus Wilson, English novelist (died 1991)

August 28 – Robertson Davies, Canadian novelist (died 1995)

October 19 – Vasco Pratolini, Italian writer (died 1991)

November 7 – Albert Camus, French writer (died 1960)

November 10 – Karl Shapiro, American poet (died 2000)

December 27 – Elizabeth Smart, Canadian poet and novelist (died 1986)

Deaths

January 21 – Aluísio Azevedo, Brazilian novelist, playwright and short story writer (born 1857)

February 9 – Oscar Méténier, French novelist and dramatist (born 1859)

February 13 – Charles Major, American novelist (born 1856)

March 7 – Pauline Johnson, Canadian poet (born 1861)

March 13 – Thomas Krag, Norwegian novelist, dramatist and short story writer (born 1868)

April 4 – Edward Dowden, Irish critic and poet (born 1843)

June 2 – Alfred Austin, English poet and Poet Laureate (born 1835)

June 13 – Camille Lemonnier, Belgian poet and journalist (born 1844)

July 8 – Louis Hémon, French novelist (rail accident, born 1880)

October 9 – D. Iacobescu, Romanian poet (born 1893)

November 26 – Frances Julia Wedgwood, English feminist novelist, biographer and critic (born 1833)

December 1 – Juhan Liiv, Estonian poet and short story writer (born 1864)

December 5 – Ferdinand Dugué, French poet and playwright (born 1816)

December 11 – Ioan Kalinderu, Romanian classical scholar, jurist and agriculturalist (born 1840)

Unknown date – Charlotte Louisa Hawkins Dempster, Scottish novelist and essayist (born 1835 in literature)

Awards

Nobel Prize for Literature: Rabindranath Tagore

Newdigate prize: Maurice Roy Ridley

In literature

The main action of Ford Madox Ford's novel The Good Soldier (1915) opens in this year.

Alan Hollinghurst's novel The Stranger's Child (2011) opens in this year.

Georges Simenon's detective fiction Maigret's First Case (La Première enquête de Maigret, 1948) is set in this year.