1921 in literature

Events

January 1 – The Jonathan Cape publishing business is established in Bloomsbury (London) by Herbert Jonathan Cape and Wren Howard.

February – Margaret Caroline Anderson and Jane Heap, publishers of The Little Review, are convicted of obscenity in a New York court for publishing the "Nausicaa" episode of James Joyce's Ulysses.

March – Jorge Luis Borges returns to his native Buenos Aires in Argentina after a period living with his family in Europe.

April 20 – Ferenc Molnár's play Liliom is first produced on Broadway in English.

May 9 – The première of Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author (Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore) at the Teatro Valle in Rome divides the audience.

June 6 – The première of Tristan Tzara's parodic The Gas Heart (Le Cœur à gaz) at a Dada Salon at the Galerie Montaigne in Paris provokes audience derision.

June 10 – D. H. Lawrence's novel Women in Love is first published in a trade edition, by Martin Secker in London.

September 5 – The Cervantes Theatre (Buenos Aires) opens with a production of Lope de Vega's La dama boba ("The foolish lady", 1613).

September 26 – Opening of the Maddermarket Theatre in Norwich, England, an old chapel reconstructed as a recreation of an English Renaissance theatre building for the production of period drama by an amateur repertory company under the direction of Walter Nugent Monck. The opening production is As You Like It.

December 9 – John William Gott becomes the last person in England to be imprisoned for blasphemous libel.

December 31 – Mexican poet Manuel Maples Arce distributes the first Stridentist manifesto, Comprimido estridentista, in the broadsheet Actual n°1 (Mexico City).

Fiction

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa – "Autumn Mountain" (秋山, Akiyama)

Edgar Rice Burroughs – Tarzan the Terrible

James Branch Cabell – Figures of Earth

Hall Caine – The Master of Man

Karel Čapek – Trapné povídky (Embarrassing Stories, translated as Money and other stories)

Willa Cather – Alexander's Bridge

Arthur Chapman – Mystery Ranch

A. E. Coppard – Adam & Eve & Pinch Me: Tales

Marie Corelli – The Secret Power

Miloš Crnjanski – The Journal of Čarnojević (Дневник о Чарнојевићу, Dnevnik o Čarnojeviću)

Walter de la Mare – Memoirs of a Midget

Fran Saleški Finžgar – Pod svobodnim soncem

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Beautiful and Damned (serialized in Metropolitan Magazine (New York))

Flappers and Philosophers (short stories)

Mikkjel Fønhus – Troll-Elgen

John Galsworthy – To Let (last book of The Forsyte Saga)

H. Rider Haggard – She and Allan

Georgette Heyer – The Black Moth

A. S. M. Hutchinson – If Winter Comes

Aldous Huxley – Crome Yellow

Frigyes Karinthy – Capillaria

Sheila Kaye-Smith – Joanna Godden

Denis Mackail – Romance to the Rescue

René Maran – Batouala

L. M. Montgomery – Rilla of Ingleside

George Moore – Heloise and Abelard

Paul Morand – Tender Shoots (Tendres stocks, short stories)

Baroness Orczy

Castles in the Air (short stories)

The First Sir Percy

Alejandro Pérez Lugín – Currito of the Cross (Currito de la Cruz)

Gene Stratton Porter – Her Father's Daughter

Marcel Proust

The Guermantes Way (Le Côté de Guermantes II, second part of vol. 3 of In Search of Lost Time)

Sodom and Gomorrah (Sodome et Gomorrhe I, first part of vol. 4 of In Search of Lost Time)

Sukumar Ray – HaJaBaRaLa

Iñigo Ed. Regalado – May Pagsinta'y Walang Puso

Rafael Sabatini – Scaramouche

Naoya Shiga – A Dark Night's Passing (暗夜行路, An'ya Kōro; serialized 1921–37)

Booth Tarkington – Alice Adams

Sigrid Undset – Husfrue (The Wife or The Mistress of Husaby, second part of Kristin Lavransdatter)

Eugene Walter – The Byzantine Riddle and other stories

Elinor Wylie – Nets to Catch the Wind

Francis Brett Young – The Black Diamond

Yevgeny Zamyatin – We (Мы; completed)

Children and young people

Dorita Fairlie Bruce – The Senior Prefect (later entitled Dimsie Goes to School)

Eleanor Farjeon – Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard

Charles Boardman Hawes – The Great Quest

Albert Payson Terhune – The Heart of a Dog

Drama

Hjalmar Bergman – Farmor och vår Herre (Grandmother and Our Lord, translated as Thy Rod and Thy Staff)

Karel Čapek – R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) (performed)

Karel and Josef Čapek – Pictures from the Insects' Life (Ze života hmyzu, published)

Clemence Dane – A Bill of Divorcement

Susan Glaspell – Inheritors (written) and The Verge (performed)

Roland Pertwee – Out to Win

Luigi Pirandello – Six Characters in Search of an Author

Tristan Tzara – The Gas Heart

Raden Adipati Aria Muharam Wiranatakusumah – Lutung Kasarung

Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz – The Water Hen (Kurka Wodna)

Poetry

Langston Hughes – "The Negro Speaks of Rivers", in The Crisis

Charlotte Mew – Saturday Market

William Carlos Williams – Sour Grapes

William Butler Yeats – Michael Robartes and the Dancer

Robert Frost – Mountain Interval (second print)

Non-fiction

Adolphe Appia – L’oeuvre d’art vivant (The Living Work of Art)

Joseph Chaikov – Skulptur (first Yiddish-language work on the subject)

D. H. Lawrence

Sea and Sardinia

(as Lawrence H. Davison) – Movements in European History

Edward Sapir – Language: an introduction to the study of speech

Hendrik Willem van Loon – The Story of Mankind

Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk – Further Essays on Capital and Interest

Ludwig Wittgenstein – Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Births

January 5 – Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Swiss writer (died 1990)

January 19 – Patricia Highsmith, American crime writer (died 1995)

February 4 – Betty Friedan, American feminist author (died 2006)

February 15 – Radha Krishna Choudhary, Indian historian and writer (died 1985)

March 1 – Richard Wilbur, American poet and translator

March 24 – Wilson Harris, Guyanese poet, novelist and essayist

May 23

James Blish, American science fiction author (died 1975)

Ray Lawler, Australian dramatist

May 29 – Henry Scholberg, American bibliographer (died 2012)

June 11 – Michael Meyer, English translator and biographer (died 2000)

August 11 – Alex Haley, American writer (died 1992)

August 17 – Elinor Lyon, English children's writer (died 2008)

September 12 – Stanisław Lem, Polish science fiction novelist, philosopher, satirist and physician (died 2006)

September 26 – Cyprian Ekwensi, Nigerian writer (died 2007)

October 9 – Tadeusz Różewicz, Polish poet, dramatist and writer (died 2014)

October 17 – George Mackay Brown, Scottish poet (died 1996)

November 6 – James Jones, American novelist (died 1977)

November 22 – Brian Cleeve, Irish author (died 2003)

December 20 – Israil Bercovici, Romanian dramatist and historian (died 1988)

Deaths

March 22 – E. W. Hornung, English author (born 1866)

April 6 – Maximilian Berlitz, German-born American textbook writer and language school proprietor (born 1852)

May 5 – Alfred Hermann Fried, Austrian publicist (born 1864)

May 12 – Emilia Pardo Bazán, Spanish novelist (born 1851)

May 13 – Jean Aicard, French writer (born 1848)

June 5 – Georges Feydeau, French playwright (born 1862)

July 7 – Luca Caragiale, Romanian poet, novelist and translator (pneumonia, born 1893)

June 26 – Alfred Percy Sinnett, English Theosophist author (born 1840)

July 4 – Antoni Grabowski, Polish Esperantist (born 1857)

August 7 – Alexander Blok, Russian poet (born 1880)

August 25 – Nikolay Gumilev, Russian poet (executed, born 1886)

October 10 – Otto von Gierke, German historian (born 1841)

November 8 – Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav, Slovak poet, dramatist and translator (born 1849)

November 14 – Christabel Rose Coleridge English novelist and editor (born 1843)

Unknown date – John Habberton, American critic (born 1842)

Awards

James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: Walter de la Mare, Memoirs of a Midget

James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: Lytton Strachey, Queen Victoria

Nobel Prize for Literature: Anatole France

Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Zona Gale, Miss Lulu Bett

Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: no award given

Pulitzer Prize for the Novel: Edith Wharton – The Age of Innocence