Events
- February 2 – Beyond the Horizon, Eugene O'Neill's second full-length play, opens with a Morosco Theatre matinée in New York City, partly as a producer's experiment and partly to quiet the actor Richard Bennett, who sought to play the lead. Reviewers hail the play and O'Neill gains fame.[1]
- February 27 – An inaugural meeting of the Bloomsbury Group's Memoir Club is arranged by Mary MacCarthy in London.[2]
- Spring – The poet Anton Podbevšek and others organize the Novo Mesto Spring (Novomeška pomlad) event, the beginning of Slovenian Modernism.
- March 15 – The Blue Flame, a four-act play by George V. Hobart and John Willard after Leta Vance Nicholson, opens at the Shubert Theatre (New York City) on Broadway before a year's U.S. tour. Though described by a critic as "one of the worst plays ever written,"[3] it is a commercial success, largely due to Theda Bara as the central character of a vamp.
- March 22 – Federico García Lorca's first play, The Butterfly's Evil Spell (El maleficio de la mariposa) is poorly received at its première in Madrid.
- March 26 – This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald sets him up as a writer and celebrity. An initial 3,000 copies sell out in three days. The book's reputation dims in later years, but Dorothy Parker will recall that it was seen as innovative when it first appeared.
- April
- Hart Crane publishes his poem "My Grandmother's Love Letters" in The Dial, his first major move toward recognition as a poet.
- The pulp magazine Black Mask is launched in New York City as "An Illustrated Magazine of Detective Mystery, Adventure, Romance, and Spiritualism" by journalist H. L. Mencken and drama critic George Jean Nathan.
- April 3 – F. Scott Fitzgerald marries Zelda Sayre in the rectory of St. Patrick's Cathedral (Manhattan).[4]
- May 1 – F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" appears in the Saturday Evening Post and on the magazine's cover, illustrated by artist Norman Rockwell.
- July – Krishna Lal Adhikari's Makaiko Kheti (The Cultivation of Maize) is published in Nepal; following claims that it contains "mischievous expressions to treason", the author is sentenced on August 2 to nine years in prison (where he will die in 1923) and all known copies of the book are destroyed.[5]
- August 22 – The Salzburg Festival in Austria is inaugurated with a performance of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's play Jedermann (Everyman, 1911) in front of Salzburg Cathedral, directed by Max Reinhardt.[6]
- October – Agatha Christie's first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, appears in the U.S., introducing her long-running Belgian detective Hercule Poirot in the setting of an English country house. The book is published in the U.K. on January 21, 1921.
- November 1 – Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones plays at the Playwright's Theater in New York City with Charles Sidney Gilpin in the title role.[7]
- November 9 – D. H. Lawrence's novel Women in Love appears in a limited U.S. subscribers' edition.[8]
- December – The first edition of the Poems of the English war poet Wilfred Owen, killed in action in 1918, appears in London, introduced by his friend Siegfried Sassoon but with much of the editing carried out by Edith Sitwell. Only five of Owen's verses having been published in his lifetime, the collection introduces his work to many readers. It includes the 1917 poems "Anthem for Doomed Youth" and "Dulce et Decorum est", one of the best-known poetic condemnations of war.[9]
- December 23 – Arthur Schnitzler's play Reigen (La Ronde, 1900) receives a first authorized performance, in Berlin, where it is criticized on moral and anti-Semitic grounds.[10]
- Christmas – Monteiro Lobato's children's story "A Menina do Narizinho Arrebitado" (Girl with the Upturned Nose), the origin of the Sítio do Picapau Amarelo novel series, is published in Brazil.
- unknown dates
- Erwin von Busse, using the pseudonym Granand, publishes Das erotische Komödiengärtlein (Berlin Garden of Erotic Delights), a collection of short stories about sexually charged encounters between men. It is promptly banned.[11]
- Karel Čapek's drama R.U.R: Rossum's Universal Robots, published in Prague, introduces the word robot into English.[12][13]
- Publication in Paris of the first volume of the Collection Budé initiates editions of classical texts with parallel French translation: Plato's Hippias Minor (Hippias Mineur).[14]
- Van Wyck Brooks' The Ordeal of Mark Twain controversially argues that Twain was "a victim of arrested development" with a dual personality.[15] It begins a reassessment of an author seen hitherto mainly as a humorous writer. The 1920s will bring similar reconsideration of many 19th-century American writers, notably Herman Melville[16] and Emily Dickinson.[17]
