1924 in literature

Events

January

Writer Miguel de Unamuno is for the first time dismissed from his university posts by the Spanish dictator General Miguel Primo de Rivera and goes into exile on Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands.

Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln ("Max") Schuster establish the New York City publisher Simon & Schuster, initially specialising in crossword puzzle books.

January 15 – The world's first radio play, Danger by Richard Hughes, is broadcast by the British Broadcasting Company from its studios in London.

February 2 – A substantially rewritten version of Roi Cooper Megrue and Walter C. Hackett's 1914 farce It Pays to Advertise in a new production by actor-manager Tom Walls opens at the Aldwych Theatre in London. It runs until 10 July 1925, a total of 598 performances, and is the first of a sequence of twelve "Aldwych farces".

March 3 – Seán O'Casey's drama Juno and the Paycock opens at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin.

March – Leonard and Virginia Woolf move themselves and the Hogarth Press back to a house in Bloomsbury (London) at 52 Tavistock Square.

April – Ford Madox Ford publishes the first book of a four-volume work set around World War I titled Parade's End, which is concluded in 1928.

April 12 – Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore arrives in China, where his views prove controversial; while here, he becomes associated with Xu Zhimo and Lin Huiyin.

May 3 – F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald leave New York for France.

June 4 – E. M. Forster's novel A Passage to India is published in the U.K. He will write no further fiction in the remaining 46 years of his life.

September – The first translation of Thomas Mann's work into English is published, Buddenbrooks (1901), translated by the American Helen T. Lowe-Porter.

Hebrew language poet Hayim Nahman Bialik relocates with his publishing house Dvir from Berlin to Tel Aviv.

Likely date – Ret Marut (perhaps previously Otto Feige and presumptively later the writer 'B. Traven') leaves Europe for Mexico.

Fiction

Felix Aderca – Moartea unei republici roșii

Michael Arlen – The Green Hat

Henry Howarth Bashford (anonymously) – Augustus Carp, Esq., By Himself: Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man

Johan Bojer – Vor egen stamme (The Emigrants)

Louis Bromfield – The Green Bay Tree

John Buchan – The Three Hostages

Edgar Rice Burroughs

The Land That Time Forgot

Tarzan and the Ant Men

Agatha Christie

The Man in the Brown Suit

Poirot Investigates

Alfred Döblin – Berge Meere und Giganten (Mountains, Seas and Giants)

Johan Fabricius – De Scheepsjongens van Bontekoe (The Cabin Boys of Bontekoe)

Edna Ferber – So Big

Dorothy Canfield Fisher – The Home-Maker

Ford Madox Ford – Some Do Not . . .

Jean Forge – Saltego trans Jarmiloj

E. M. Forster – A Passage to India

Mikheil Javakhishvili

Jaqo's Dispossessed

Kvachi Kvachantiradze

Harry Stephen Keeler – The Voice of the Seven Sparrows

Margaret Kennedy – The Constant Nymph

Magdalen King-Hall (as Cleone Knox) – Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion 1764-5

Halldór Laxness – Undir Helgahnúk

Benito Lynch – The Englishman of the Bones

Thomas Mann – The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg)

Lucia Mantu – Cucoana Olimpia

John Masefield – Sard Harker

F. M. Mayor – The Rector's Daughter

Herman Melville (d. 1891) – Billy Budd, Sailor

Dmitry Merezhkovsky – Akhnaton, King of Egypt

George Moore – Peronnik the Fool

Paul Morand – Lewis and Irene

R. H. Mottram – The Spanish Farm

Baroness Orczy

The Honourable Jim

Pimpernel and Rosemary

Les Beaux et les Dandys de Grand Siècles en Angleterre

Eden Phillpotts – The Treasures of Typhon

Joseph Roth

Hotel Savoy

Rebellion

Arthur Schnitzler – Fräulein Else

Þórbergur Þórðarson – Bréf til Láru

Edgar Wallace – The Dark Eyes of London

Hugh Walpole – The Old Ladies

Gertrude Chandler Warner – The Box-Car Children

Edith Wharton – The Old Maid

Walter F. White – The Fire In The Flint

P. C. Wren – Beau Geste

Yevgeny Zamyatin – We (first published, in English translation)

Children and young people

Edgar Rice Burroughs

The Land That Time Forgot

Tarzan and the Ant Men

Anne Parrish – The Dream Coach

Drama

Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings – What Price Glory?

Louis Aragon – Backs to the Wall

Bertolt Brecht – The Life of Edward II of England (Leben Eduards des Zweiten von England, adapted from Marlowe)

Mikhail Bulgakov – The Fatal Eggs (Роковые яйца)

Alberto Casella – La morte in vacanza ("Death takes a holiday")

Noël Coward

The Vortex (first performed)

Hay Fever (written)

Easy Virtue (written)

Ramón del Valle-Inclán – Bohemian Lights (Luces de Bohemia)

Nikolai Erdman – The Mandate (Мандат)

Agha Hashar Kashmiri – Aankh ka Nasha

George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly – Beggar on Horseback

Seán O'Casey – Juno and the Paycock

Eugene O'Neill – Desire Under the Elms

Henrik Rytter – Herman Ravn

Sergei Tretyakov – The Gas Masks (Противогазы)

Tristan Tzara – Handkerchief of Clouds (Mouchoir de Nuages)

Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz – The Mother (Matka)

Poetry

Edwin James Brady – The Land of the Sun

Muhammad Iqbal – Bang-i-Dara

A. A. Milne – When We Were Very Young

Pablo Neruda – Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada)

Saint-John Perse – Anabase

Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo – La Coupe de cendres

Non-fiction

Sarah Bernhardt – The Art of the Theatre

Emma Goldman – My Further Disillusionment in Russia

Agnes Mure Mackenzie – The Women in Shakespeare's Plays

Lowell Thomas – With Lawrence in Arabia

Mark Twain – The Autobiography of Mark Twain

Hugh Walpole – The English Novel: Some Notes on its Evolution

H. G. Wells – The Story of a Great Schoolmaster

Births

January 30 – Lloyd Alexander, American writer (died 2007)

February 3 – Andrzej Szczypiorski, Polish writer (died 2000)

February 17 – Margaret Truman, novelist (died 2008)

April 3 – Josephine Pullein-Thompson, English children's novelist (died 2014)

April 8 – Humberto Costantini, Argentinian writer (died 1987)

April 24

Clement Freud, German-born English writer and broadcaster (died 2009)

Clive King, English children's writer and academic

April 26 – Solomon Mutswairo, Zimbabwean novelist and poet

May 1 – Terry Southern, American writer (died 1995)

May 8 – Petru Dumitriu, Romanian novelist (died 2002)

July 15 – Finn Bjørnseth, Norwegian novelist (died 1973)

July 30 – José Antonio Villarreal, Chicano novelist (died 2010)

August 3 – Leon Uris, American author (died 2003)

August 6 – James Baldwin, American writer (died 1987)

August 15 – Robert Bolt, English screenwriter and playwright (died 1995)

August 17 – Evan S. Connell, American author

August 22 – Ada Jafri, Indian poet writing in Urdu

September 4 – Joan Aiken, English novelist (died 2004)

September 27 – Josef Škvorecký, Czech-born novelist and publisher (died 2012)

September 30 – Truman Capote, American fiction writer (died 1984)

October 5 – José Donoso, Chilean writer (died 1996)

October 29 – Zbigniew Herbert, Polish writer (died 1998)

December 29 – Francisco Nieva, Spanish playwright, novelist and short story writer (died 2016)

Unknown dates

Deirdre Cash (Criena Rohan), Australian novelist (died 1963)

Mengistu Lemma, Ethiopian playwright (died 1988)

Deaths

April 21 – Marie Corelli, English author (born 1855)

May 4 – E. Nesbit, English children's author (born 1858)

June 3 – Franz Kafka, German-language author (born 1883)

June 30 – Jacob Israël de Haan, Dutch-Jewish novelist, poet and journalist (assassinated, born 1881

August 3 – Joseph Conrad, Polish-born English novelist (born 1857)

October 9

Valery Bryusov, Russian Symbolist poet, dramatist and translator (born 1873)

Lin Shu, Chinese translator (born 1852)

October 13 – Anatole France, French poet, novelist and journalist (born 1844)

October 25 – Laura Jean Libbey, American novelist (born 1862)

November 21 – Paul Milliet, French dramatist and librettist (born 1848)

November 22 – Herman Heijermans, Dutch dramatist (born 1864)

December 6 – Gene Stratton Porter, American novelist and naturalist (born 1863)

December 26 – Arnold Henry Savage Landor, English writer and artist (born 1865)

Awards

James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: E. M. Forster, A Passage to India

James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: Rev. William Wilson, The House of Airlie

Newbery Medal for children's literature: Charles Hawes, The Dark Frigate

Nobel Prize for Literature: Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont

Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Hatcher Hughes, Hell-Bent Fer Heaven

Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Robert Frost, New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes

Pulitzer Prize for the Novel: Margaret Wilson, The Able McLaughlins

In literature

Graham Swift's novel Mothering Sunday (2016) is set in this year.