1904 in literature

Events

• January
• *Mark Twain begins dictating his Autobiography.
• *The first issue of Süddeutsche Monatshefte is published in Munich by Paul Nikolaus Cossmann.
• January 17 – Anton Chekhov's last play, The Cherry Orchard, opens at the Moscow Art Theatre directed by Constantin Stanislavski.
• February 25 – J. M. Synge's tragedy Riders to the Sea is first performed at Molesworth Hall, Dublin, by the Irish National Theatre Society.
• March 1 – Sophie Radford de Meissner's translation of Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy's 1863 historical drama Ivan the Terrible is first played at the New Amsterdam Theatre on Broadway, New York City, by Richard Mansfield.
• April 24 – A Lithuanian press ban in the Russian Empire is lifted. Petras Vileišis installs a printing press in his Vileišis Palace in Vilnius.
• May 10 – Virginia Woolf suffers a mental breakdown after the death on February 22 of her father, Sir Leslie Stephen.
• June 16 – The original "Bloomsday", the day James Joyce first walks out with Nora Barnacle, to the Dublin suburb of Ringsend, in which the action of his novel Ulysses is set.
• June 28 – Chekhov, suffering from tuberculosis at Badenweiler, writes to his sister Masha saying his health is improving. He dies just over two weeks later.
• September – Mark Twain buys a home at 21 Fifth Avenue, New York City.
• November 1
• *George Bernard Shaw's comedy about Ireland, John Bull's Other Island, opens at the Royal Court Theatre, London, under the management of Harley Granville-Barker after W. B. Yeats rejects it for Dublin's Abbey Theatre.
• *The Stephen family have moved to a home at 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, London, where Virginia Woolf joins them about November 8. Here the Bloomsbury Group will form.
• November – Hall Caine's novel The Prodigal Son is published by Heinemann in London and opens in a dramatic adaptation at the Grand Theatre, Douglas, Isle of Man.
• December – The only known surviving copy of the first quarto edition of Shakespeare's play Titus Andronicus is discovered in Sweden.
• December 21 – The first of Virginia Woolf's writings to published, "Haworth, November 1904", an account of a visit to the Brontë family home, appears anonymously in a women's supplement to a clerical journal, The Guardian.
• December 24 – The Coliseum Theatre in London opens.
• December 27
• *The Irish National Theatre Society opens to the public in Dublin. The bill consists of three one-act plays: On Baile's Strand and Cathleen Ní Houlihan by Yeats, and Spreading the News by Lady Gregory.
• *J. M. Barrie's play Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up premières at the Duke of York's Theatre in London with Nina Boucicault in the title rôle and Gerald du Maurier as Captain Hook and Mr Darling; du Maurier is the uncle of the Llewellyn Davies boys, who inspired the story.

• Alexander Blok's poetry cycle Stikhi o prekrasnoi Dame, written to his new wife, ushers in the Silver Age of Russian Poetry.
• Seven-year-old Wasif Jawhariyyeh begins keeping diaries, later acclaimed as masterpieces of modern Arabic and Jerusalem literature.
• The Marquis de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom , written in 1785, is first published, by the Berlin sexologist Dr. Iwan Bloch.
• Translations of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace into English by Constance Garnett and by Leo Wiener are published.
• Herbert Beerbohm Tree establishes what will become the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, at His Majesty's Theatre in the Haymarket.

  New books

Fiction

• Hall Caine – The Prodigal Son
• G. K. Chesterton – The Napoleon of Notting Hill
• Joseph Conrad – Nostromo
• Machado de Assis – Esaú e Jacó
• Grazia Deledda – :it:Cenere |Cenere
• Alexandre Dumas translated by Alfred Richard Allinson – The Wolf Leader
• Claude Farrère – Fumée d'opium
• Ludwig Ganghofer – Storms in May
• John Galsworthy – The Island Pharisees
• Frederic Harrison – Theophano, The Crusade of the Tenth Century
• O. Henry – Cabbages and Kings
• Robert Herrick – The Common Lot
• Hermann Hesse – Peter Camenzind
• William Henry Hudson – Green Mansions
• Robert Smythe Hichens
• * The Garden of Allah
• * The Woman with the Fan
• Henry James – The Golden Bowl
• M. R. James – Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
• Mary Johnston – Sir Mortimer
• James Joyce – "The Sisters"
• Jack London – The Sea-Wolf
• Arthur Morrison – The Green Eye of Goona
• I. L. Peretz – "The Magician"
• Vincas Pietaris – Algimantas
• Luigi Pirandello – The Late Mattia Pascal
• Władysław Reymont – Chłopi
• Frederick Rolfe – Hadrian the Seventh
• Romain Rolland – Jean-Christophe
• Rafael Sabatini – The Tavern Knight
• Saki – Reginald
• May Sinclair – The Divine Fire
• Katherine Thurston – John Chilcote, M.P.
• Mark Twain – A Dog's Tale
• Jules Verne
• *A Drama in Livonia
• *Master of the World
• H. G. Wells – The Food of the Gods
• Owen Wister
• *A Journey In Search of Christmas
• *Philosophy 4
• Stefan Żeromski – Ashes

  Children and young people

• L. Frank Baum – The Marvelous Land of Oz
• Laura Lee Hope – The Bobbsey Twins
• Selma Lagerlöf – The Treasure
• E. Nesbit – The Phoenix and the Carpet
• Beatrix Potter
• *The Tale of Benjamin Bunny
• *The Tale of Two Bad Mice
• Leo Tolstoy – Classic Tales and Fables for Children
• P. G. Wodehouse, John W. Houghton and Philip Dadd – William Tell Told Again

  Drama