Events
- January 1 – The English novelist and wartime propagandist Hall Caine is made a Knight of the Order of the British Empire (KBE).
- January 2 – The English novelist Marie Corelli is convicted under wartime legislation against hoarding food.[1]
- January 18 – The first edition of Aussie: The Australian Soldiers' Magazine appears.
- January 23 – The English poet Robert Graves marries the painter Nancy Nicholson in London. The wedding guests include Wilfred Owen, whose first nationally published poem appears three days later ("Miners" in The Nation). He will be killed by the end of the year.
- March
- The Telemachus episode in James Joyce's Ulysses is published in serialized form in the U.S. journal The Little Review.
- The English novelist Alec Waugh is taken prisoner of war. He will be incarcerated in Mainz Citadel with the monologist J. Milton Hayes, also taken prisoner this year, and Hugh Kingsmill.
- April
- Hu Shih, chief advocate of the use of the vernacular in Chinese literature at the time, publishes an essay, "Constructive Literary Revolution – A Literature of National Speech" in the magazine New Youth (Xin Qingnian) proposing a four-point reform program.
- The English writer May Sinclair introduces the term "Stream of consciousness" to describe a narrative mode, in a discussion of Dorothy Richardson's novel sequence Pilgrimage in The Egoist.
- May 3 – The New Zealand writer and poet Katherine Mansfield marries her long-time partner John Middleton Murry at Kensington register office in London.
- June
- The 2nd annual Pulitzer Prizes are awarded in the United States, including the first award for a novel.[2]
- The English poet Basil Bunting is imprisoned as a conscientious objector.
- August 17 – The poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon meet for the last time, in London, and spend what Sassoon will recall as "the whole of a hot cloudless afternoon together."[3]
- October 3 – Siegfried Sassoon visits his mentor Robbie Ross for the last time. Sassoon will write later that Ross's goodbye gave him a "presentiment of final farewell."[3]
- November 4 – Wilfred Owen is killed in action aged 25, at the Sambre–Oise Canal, with only five of his poems published. News of his death reaches his parents in Shrewsbury a week later on Armistice Day. He is awarded a posthumous Military Cross a year later.
- December – The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (died 1889, including The Wreck of the Deutschland, 1875/1876) are published through Robert Bridges. Few were published in Hopkins' lifetime, so that this introduces his innovative sprung rhythm and imagery to many readers.
- December 28 – Emperor Khải Định of Vietnam declares the traditional Chữ nôm script for the Vietnamese language to be replaced by the Latin script Vietnamese alphabet.
- Winter – Parisian farceur Georges Feydeau contracts tertiary syphilis.