1897 in literature

Events

• January–March – Oscar Wilde, imprisoned in Reading Gaol in England, writes a letter to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, De Profundis.
• January 2 – Newspapers in London erroneously report the death of Mark Twain. It is believed the rumors began when Twain's cousin had become ill. Twain makes his famous statement, "The report of my death was an exaggeration."
• April–December – H. G. Wells' science fiction novel The War of the Worlds is serialized in Pearson's Magazine.
• April 13 – The Grand Guignol is opened in Paris by Oscar Méténier.
• May 19 – Oscar Wilde is released early this morning from Pentonville Prison in London, to which he has been transferred from Reading via Twyford the previous night. This afternoon he visits Hatchards bookshop briefly before catching an evening train to Newhaven, on his way to exile on the continent under the pseudonym "Sebastian Melmoth".
• May 26 – The theatrical manager Bram Stoker's contemporary Gothic horror novel Dracula is published in London by Constable with a late change of title from The Un-Dead. It will influence vampire literature for the following century. On May 18 he had staged a reading of a dramatised version for copyright purposes before an audience of two at the Lyceum Theatre, London.
• July 2 – The Yorkshire Dialect Society is founded, the oldest such society in England.
• July 25 – The writer Jack London sails to join the Klondike Gold Rush, where he will write his first successful stories.
• October – The first issue of Albina, a Romanian literary and agriculturalist magazine aimed at a peasant readership, is published in Bucharest by Ioan Kalinderu, George Coșbuc and Petre Dulfu.
• November 1 – The Library of Congress Building in Washington, D.C., is opened.
• December 28 – Edmond Rostand's play Cyrano de Bergerac opens at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin in Paris with the theater's director, Coquelin aîné, in the title role. The applause lasts for more than an hour.
• December 30 – The comedy The White Horse Inn , by Oscar Blumenthal and Gustav Kadelburg, opens in Berlin. Decades later it will be turned into a successful musical play.

• Hall Caine's novel The Christian: a story is published and becomes the first in Britain to sell a million copies. The author also writes a dramatization.
• Anna Katharine Green's That Affair Next Door introduces the first female fictional detective character in a novel, Amelia Butterworth, an inquisitive New York society spinster.
• Benito Pérez Galdós is elected to the Real Academia Española.
• The publisher Doubleday is founded as the Doubleday & McClure Company by Frank Nelson Doubleday in partnership with magazine publisher Samuel McClure in New York City.
• The publisher Commercial Press is founded as the first modern publishing organisation in China, by 26-year-old Xia Ruifang and three friends in Shanghai.

  New books

Fiction

• John Kendrick Bangs – The Pursuit of the House-Boat
• Léon Bloy – The Woman Who Was Poor
• Hall Caine – The Christian
• Kate Chopin
• *A Night in Acadie
• *"A Pair of Silk Stockings"
• Joseph Conrad – The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'
• Miguel de Unamuno – Paz en la guerra
• Mary E. Wilkins Freeman – Jerome
• John Galsworthy – From the Four Winds
• George Gissing – The Whirlpool
• Ellen Glasgow – The Descendant
• Sarah Grand – The Beth Book
• Thomas Hardy – The Well-Beloved
• Victor Ido – Don Juan
• Henry James
• *The Spoils of Poynton
• *What Maisie Knew
• Fred T. Jane – To Venus in Five Seconds
• Hans E. Kinck – Den nye kapellanen
• Camille Lemonnier – L'Homme en amour
• Pierre Loti – Ramuntcho
• Richard Marsh – The Beetle
• W. Somerset Maugham – Liza of Lambeth
• Silas Weir Mitchell – Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker
• Arthur Morrison – The Dorrington Deed Box
• Bolesław Prus – Pharaoh
• Władysław Reymont – The Promised Land
• Amanda McKittrick Ros – Irene Iddesleigh
• Robert Louis Stevenson – St. Ives
• Bram Stoker – Dracula
• August Strindberg – Inferno
• Jules Verne – An Antarctic Mystery
• Ethel Lilian Voynich – The Gadfly
• Lew Wallace – The Wooing of Malkatoon
• H. G. Wells – The Invisible Man

  Children and young people

• L. Frank Baum – Mother Goose in Prose
• Elsa Beskow – :sv:Sagan om den lilla, lilla gumman|Sagan om den lilla, lilla gumman
• Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler – The Professor's Children
• Rudyard Kipling
• *Captains Courageous
• *The Third Jungle Book
• E. Nesbit – The Children's Shakespeare

  Drama

• Gabriele D'Annunzio – Il Sogno di un mattino di primavera
• Anton Chekhov – Uncle Vanya
• Octave Mirbeau – Les Mauvais bergers
• Edmond Rostand – Cyrano de Bergerac
• Arthur Schnitzler – La Ronde

  Poetry

• Þorsteinn Erlingsson – Þyrnar
• See also 1897 in poetry

  Non-fiction

• Adolphe Appia – Musique et mise en scéne
• Annie Besant – The Ancient Wisdom
• Alice Diehl – Musical Memories
• Émile Durkheim – Le Suicide
• Gustav Jaeger – Problems of Nature: Researches and Discoveries
• Stéphane Mallarmé – Divagations
• Nouveau Larousse illustré
• Ralph Waldo Trine – In Tune With The Infinite: Fullness of Peace, Power and Plenty
• Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman – The Decoration of Houses

  Births

• January 11 – Bernard DeVoto, American historian
• January 14 – Wasif Jawhariyyeh, Palestinian Arab diarist, poet, and composer
• January 19 – Natacha Rambova, American dramatist
• January 27 – Iris Tree, English poet
• March 8 – Josep Pla, Catalan journalist and writer
• March 18 – Barbu Solacolu, Romanian poet, translator and economist
• March 23 – Béla Hamvas, Hungarian philosopher
• May 11 – Carola Oman, English historical novelist, biographer and children's writer
• June 20 – Elisabeth Hauptmann, German writer
• July 1 – Edward Wyndham Tennant, English poet
• July 15 – R. J. Yeatman, English humorous author
• July 25 – Basil Willey, English academic literary critic
• August 11
• *Enid Blyton – English children's author
• *Louise Bogan – American poet
• September 25 – William Faulkner, American novelist
• September 26 – Michael Joseph, English publisher
• October 3 – James Hanley, English novelist and dramatist of Irish descent
• October 4 – Jirō Osaragi, Japanese novelist
• October 17 – Ștefana Velisar Teodoreanu, Romanian novelist, memoirist and poet
• October 21 – Alexander Lernet-Holenia, Austrian poet, dramatist and fiction writer
• October 22 – Marjorie Flack, American children's author
• November 1 – Naomi Mitchison, Scottish novelist and poet
• November 7 – Herman J. Mankiewicz, American screenwriter
• November 8 – Dorothy Day, American journalist
• November 28 – Marcus Goodrich, American screenwriter and novelist
• December 3 – Kate O'Brien, Irish novelist and dramatist
• October 23 – Arab Shamilov, Kurdish novelist

  Deaths

• February 4 – Walter Gregor, Scottish folklorist, linguist and pastor
• March 2 – Guillermo Prieto, Mexican novelist, short-story writer and poet
• March 6 – E. Cobham Brewer, English lexicographer
• March 7 – Harriet Jacobs, African-American writer
• March 11 – Henry Drummond, Scottish evangelist and natural historian
• April 26 – Manonmaniam Sundaram Pillai, Indian scholar and dramatist
• May 4 – Isabella Banks, English poet and novelist
• June 25 – Margaret Oliphant, Scottish novelist
• July 6 – Henri Meilhac, French dramatist and opera librettist
• July 20 – Jean Ingelow, English novelist and poet
• July 28 – Étienne Vacherot, French philosophical writer
• August 2 – Adam Asnyk, Polish poet and dramatist
• August 5 – James Hammond Trumbull, American philologist
• August 8 – Jacob Burckhardt, Swiss historian
• August 25 – Léon Gautier, French historian
• September 9
• *Richard Holt Hutton, English critic and journalist
• *Ferenc Pulszky, Hungarian political writer
• October 23 – Jessie Catherine Couvreur, Australian novelist
• October 24 – Francis Turner Palgrave, English anthologist
• November 29 – James Legge, Scottish sinologist, missionary and translator
• December 17 – Alphonse Daudet, French novelist

  Awards

• Stanhope Essay Prize – John Buchan