1901 in literature explained

This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1901.

Events

• January 31 – Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters (Три сeстры, Tri sestry) opens at the Moscow Art Theatre, directed by Constantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko with Stanislavski as Vershinin, Olga Knipper as Masha, Margarita Savetskaya as Olga, Maria Andreyeva as Irina, and Maria Lilina (Stanislavsky's wife) as Natasha.
• February 22 – Leo Tolstoy is excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church.^[1]
• May 1 – Publication of Maurice Maeterlinck's The Life of the Bee in Belgium.^[2]
• May 6 – Swedish dramatist August Strindberg, 52, marries his third wife, the Swedish-Norwegian actress Harriet Bosse, 23, after an engagement in March during rehearsals for his play Easter (Påsk).
• May 25 – Chekhov marries Olga Knipper in a quiet ceremony.^[3]
• May 28 – Cherry v. Des Moines Leader is decided in the Iowa Supreme Court, upholding the right to publish critical reviews.
• June 28 – G. K. Chesterton marries Frances Blogg at St Mary Abbots, Kensington.
• July – The first modern performances of Everyman, the 15th-century morality play, are given by William Poel's Elizabethan Stage Society outdoors at the Charterhouse in London.^{[4] [5]}
• July 24 – O. Henry is released from prison in Columbus, Ohio after serving three years for embezzlement.
• October
  • Thomas Mann's first novel, Buddenbrooks, is published in Berlin.
  • The Irish Literary Theatre project gives its final performance.^[6]
• October 23 – Mark Twain receives an honorary doctorate of literature from Yale University. In the same month he moves to Riverdale, New York.
• December 2 – The Romanian literary review Sămănătorul is founded.^[7]
• December 10 – The first Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded, to French poet Sully Prudhomme.^[8]
• unknown date – World's Classics series of publications is founded by Grant Richards in England.

New books

Fiction

• Ignacio Manuel Altamirano – El Zarco^{[9] [10]}
• Leonid Andreyev – «повести» (stories)
• E.F. Benson – The Luck of the Vails
• René Boylesve – La Becquée
• Samuel Butler – Erewhon Revisited
• Hall Caine – The Eternal City
• Winston Churchill – The Crisis
• Colette – Claudine à Paris
• Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford – The Inheritors
• Victoria Cross – Anna Lombard
• Patrick S. Dinneen – Cormac Ó Conaill (first novel in Irish published complete in book form)
• George Douglas – The House with the Green Shutters
• Miles Franklin – My Brilliant Career
• Géza Gárdonyi – A láthatatlan ember (The Invisible Man)
• George Griffith – A Honeymoon in Space
• Henry James – The Sacred Fount
• Johannes V. Jensen – The Fall of the King
• Rudyard Kipling – Kim
• Jean Lorrain
  • Monsieur de Phocas
  • Le Vice errant
• George Barr McCutcheon – Graustark: The Story of a Love Behind a Throne
• Thomas Mann – Buddenbrooks
• George Moore – Sister Theresa
• Frank Norris – The Octopus
• Charles-Louis Philippe – Bubu de Montparnasse
• Luigi Pirandello – The Outcast (L'Esclusa)
• Liane de Pougy – Idylle Saphique
• José Maria de Eça de Queiroz – A Cidade e as Serras
• Alice Hegan Rice – Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch
• M. P. Shiel
  • Lord of the Sea^[11]
  • The Purple Cloud
• Bram Stoker and Valdimar Ásmundsson – Makt Myrkranna (Powers of Darkness, Icelandic language adaptation of Stoker's Dracula)
• Rabindranath Tagore – Nastanirh (নষ্টনীড়, The Broken Nest)
• William Alexander Taylor – Intermere
• Jules Verne
  • The Sea Serpent (Les Histoires de Jean-Marie Cabidoulin)
  • The Village in the Treetops (Le Village aérien)
• H. G. Wells – The First Men in the Moon
• Émile Zola – Travail

Children and young people

• John Kendrick Bangs – Mr. Munchausen
• L. Frank Baum
  • American Fairy Tales
  • The Master Key
  • Dot and Tot of Merryland
• Evelyn Everett-Green – True Stories of Girl Heroines
• Mary Catherine Judd, illustrated by Angel De Cora – Wigwam stories

Drama

• Gabriele D'Annunzio – Francesca da Rimini
• J. M. Barrie – Quality Street
• Roberto Bracco – Lost in the Dark (Sperduti nel buio)
• Hall Caine – The Eternal City
• Anton Chekhov – Three Sisters
• Clyde Fitch – The Climbers
• Haralamb Lecca – Quinta. Suprema forță
• Wilhelm Meyer-Förster – Old Heidelberg (Alt Heidelberg)
• Louis N. Parker – The Cardinal
• August Strindberg – A Dream Play (Ett drömspel, published)
• Stanisław Wyspiański
  • Warszawianka (Varsovian Anthem, stage première)
  • The Wedding (Wesele)

Poetry

See main article: article and 1901 in poetry.

• Henry Ames Blood – Selected Poems of Henry Ames Blood
• Maxim Gorky – The Song of the Stormy Petrel (Песня о Буревестнике)
• Thomas Hardy – Poems of the Past and the Present
• Akiko Yosano (与謝野 晶子) – Midaregami (みだれ髪, Tangled Hair)

Non-fiction

• Annie Besant, Charles Webster Leadbeater – Thought-Forms: A Record of Clairvoyant Investigation
• Sigmund Freud – The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens)
• Francis Procter and Walter Frere – A New History of the Book of Common Prayer
• Seebohm Rowntree – Poverty, A Study of Town Life
• Edith Helen Sichel – Women and Men of the French Renaissance
• Rudolf Steiner – Die Mystik im Aufgange des neuzeitlichen Geisteslebens, und ihr Verhältnis zur modernen Weltan-schauung (Mysticism at the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life, and its Relationship with Modern World-views)
• A. E. Waite – The Life of Louis Claude de Saint-Martin
• Booker T. Washington – Up from Slavery
• H. G. Wells – Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought

Births

• January 1 – Elisabeth Kyle, Scottish novelist and journalist (died 1982)
• January 17 – Hryhorii Epik, Ukrainian writer and journalist (shot with many other Ukrainian intellectuals at Sandarmokh 1937)^[12]
• January 31 – Marie Luise Kaschnitz (Marie Luise von Holzing-Berslett), German story writer, novelist and poet (died 1974)
• February 2 – Valerian Pidmohylny, Ukrainian modernist (shot at Sandarmokh 1937)^[13]
• February 3 – Rosamond Lehmann, English novelist (died 1990)
• February 13 – Lewis Grassic Gibbon (James Leslie Mitchell), Scottish novelist (died 1935)
• February 23 – Ivar Lo-Johansson, Swedish novelist and journalist (died 1990)
• March 4 (or 1903) – Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo (Joseph-Casimir Rabearivelo), Malagasy Francophone poet (suicide 1937)
• April 10 – Anna Kavan (Helen Emily Woods, Helen Ferguson), French-born English novelist and short story writer (died 1968)
• April 21 – Gladys Mitchell, English crime fiction writer (died 1983)
• May 1 – Antal Szerb, Hungarian writer (died 1945)
• May 2 – Margaret Wetherby Williams (Margaret Erskine), English crime fiction writer (died 1984)
• May 15 – Xavier Herbert, Australian novelist (died 1984)
• May 26 – Norman Denny, English writer and translator (died 1982)
• June 1 – John Van Druten, English-born American dramatist (died 1957)
• June 23 – Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Turkish novelist and essayist (died 1962)
• July 9 – Barbara Cartland, English romantic novelist, historian and playwright (died 2000)
• July 20 – Dilys Powell, English film critic (died 1995)
• July 25 – Ruth Krauss, American children's author and poet (died 1993)
• August 10 – Sergio Frusoni, Cape Verde poet and promoter of Cape Verdean Creole language (died 1975)
• August 17 – Heðin Brú, Faroese fiction writer and translator (died 1987)
• August 20 – Salvatore Quasimodo, Italian poet and translator (died 1968)
• October 25 – Samuil Lehtțir, Soviet Moldovan poet, critic and literary theorist (shot 1937)
• November 3 – André Malraux, French author (died 1976)
• November 4 – Ernest Elmore (John Bude), English crime writer and theatre director (died 1957)
• December 9 – Ödön von Horváth, Austro-Hungarian dramatist and novelist (died 1938)
• December 16 – Margaret Mead, American anthropologist and author (died 1978)^[14]

Deaths

• January 1 – Ignatius L. Donnelly, American politician and writer (born 1831)
• January 14 – Víctor Balaguer, Catalan Spanish dramatist and poet (born 1824)
• January 17 – Frederic W. H. Myers, British poet (born 1843)
• January 26 – Grigore Sturdza, Moldavian and Romanian adventurer, literary sponsor and philosopher (pneumonia, born 1821)
• February 2 – John Cordy Jeaffreson, English novelist and non-fiction writer (born 1831)
• February 7 – Rowena Granice Steele, first female novelist in California (born 1824)
• February 15 – Maurice Thompson, American novelist (born 1844)
• February 18 – Anna Gardner, American author, abolitionist, teacher, reformer (born 1816)
• March 19 – Philippe Gille, French dramatist (born 1831)
• April 6 – George Murray Smith, English publisher (born 1824)
• April 10 — Harriet Newell Kneeland Goff, reformer and author (born 1828)
• April 12 – Louis Auguste Sabatier, French theologian (born 1839)
• April 26 – Harriett Ellen Grannis Arey, American educator, author, editor, and publisher (born 1819)
• May 24 – Charlotte Mary Yonge, English novelist (born 1823)
• June 4 – Charlotte Fowler Wells, American phrenologist and publisher (born 1814)
• June 5 – Dagny Juel, Norwegian writer and artists' model (shot, born 1867)
• June 9 – Walter Besant, English novelist and historian (born 1836)^[15]
• June 10 – Robert Williams Buchanan, Scottish poet, novelist and dramatist (born 1841)
• July 7 – Johanna Spyri, Swiss children's writer (born 1827)
• July 18 – Jan ten Brink, Dutch novelist (born 1834)
• July 20 – William Cosmo Monkhouse, English poet and critic (born 1840)
• July 27 – Brooke Foss Westcott, English theologian (born 1825)
• August 4 – Harriet Pritchard Arnold, American author (born 1858)
• August 9 – Vishnudas Bhave, Indian dramatist (unknown birth year)
• October 28 – Paul Rée, German author and philosopher (born 1849)
• October 31 – Julien Leclercq, French Symbolist poet and art critic (born 1865)
• November 6 – Kate Greenaway, English children's illustrator and writer (born 1846)^[16]
• November 21 – V. A. Urechia, Romanian historian, writer and politician (born 1834)^[17]
• December 28 – Mary K. Buck, Bohemian-born American author (born 1849)

Awards

• Nobel Prize for Literature

Sully Prudhomme

Notes and References

1. [s:https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Decree_of_Excommunication_of_Leo_Tolstoy|Decree of Excommunication of Leo Tolstoy.]
2. Book: Legrand, Jacques. Chronicle of the 20th Century. Ecam Publication. 1987. 27. 0-942191-01-3.
3. "I have a horror of weddings, the congratulations and the champagne, standing around, glass in hand with an endless grin on your face." Letter to Olga Knipper, April 19, 1901.
4. Stephen G. Kuehler (2008).
5. https://books.google.com/books?id=tt1iRQrIhkYC Concealing God: The "Everyman" revival, 1901–1903.
6. Book: William Butler Yeats. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume VIII: The Irish Dramatic Movement. 30 June 2008. Simon and Schuster. 978-1-4391-0612-9. 11.
7. Valeriu . Râpeanu . Sămănătorul acum 100 de ani . . December 2001.
8. https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/award_ceremonies/eyewitness/henschen/ Nobel Prize official website: From the First Nobel Prize Award Ceremony, 1901
9. Web site: Altamirano, Ignacio Manuel. Escritores.org . 15 January 2019.
10. Web site: Resumen de El Zarco (Ignacio Manuel Altamirano) . 28 June 2017 . 15 January 2019.
11. Book: Sutherland, John . Bestsellers: a very short introduction . Oxford University Press . 2007 . 978-0-19-921489-1 . 86.
12. Web site: Epik, Hryhorii . encyclopediaofukraine.com . 1 April 2024.
13. Web site: Pidmohylny, Valeriian . encyclopediaofukraine.com . 1 April 2024.
14. Web site: Margaret Mead Biography, Theory, Books, & Facts . Encyclopedia Britannica . 16 February 2020 . en.
15. Book: Charles Wells Moulton. The mid-nineteenth century to Edwardianism. 1966. F. Ungar Publishing Company. 416.
16. Book: Clark. Mary Bruccoli. Richard Layman. Gale Cengage. Clark Bruccoli. Mary Layman Richard. British Children's Writers, 1880-1914. 1994. Gale Research. 978-0-8103-5555-2. 141.
17. [George Călinescu]