1907 in literature

Events

• Early – The seven-year-old future novelist Elizabeth Bowen moves with her mother from Ireland to the south of England.
• January 3 – The National Theatre opens in Sofia, Bulgaria.
• January 26 – Many of the audience boo the opening performance of J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. Disturbances continue for a week.
• February 4 – The poet W. B. Yeats, at a public debate at the Abbey Theatre, denies trying to suppress audience distaste during a performance of The Playboy of the Western World.
• February 22 – Leonid Andreyev's symbolist drama The Life of Man is premièred at the Komissarzhevskaya Theatre in Saint Petersburg, directed by Vsevolod Meyerkhold. On December 12 it is performed for the first time at the Moscow Art Theatre, directed by Konstantin Stanislavski and Leopold Sulerzhitsky.
• March – The Diamond Sūtra, a woodblock printed Buddhist scripture dated AD 868, is discovered by Aurel Stein at the Mogao Caves near Dunhuang in China. It is said to be "the earliest complete survival of a dated printed book".
• March – April
• *As an aftermath of the Romanian peasants' revolt comes a government clampdown on the radical authors Constantin Banu and Nicolae Iorga, whose homes are raided by police. N. D. Cocea is prosecuted for sedition and Barbu Lăzăreanu expelled from the country. From Berlin, Ion Luca Caragiale watches the events with a "hopelessness stifled by disgust", as reported by his son Luca. His exposé demanding social justice in the Romanian Kingdom is translated into German by Mite Kremnitz and carried by Die Zeit of Vienna. The "pillars of fire" witnessed by Banu inspire him to name his 1911 magazine Flacăra – "Flame".
• *Virginia Woolf and others of the Stephen family move within London's Bloomsbury to 29 Fitzroy Square, a former home of George Bernard Shaw.
• April 17 – August Strindberg's A Dream Play receives its first performance, at the Swedish Theatre, with his ex-wife Harriet Bosse in the leading rôle.
• April 23 – Jack and Charmian London sail out of San Francisco Bay to begin the voyage described in The Cruise of the Snark.
• May to September – Kenneth Grahame writes letters to his son that become the basis for The Wind in the Willows.
• May – The British publishers Thomas Nelson and William Collins, Sons launch cheap hardback in-copyright imprints.
• May 15 – American humorist Gelett Burgess coins the term "blurb" for promotional text on a book jacket.
• June 26 – Mark Twain receives an honorary doctorate of laws from the University of Oxford, England.
• September 7 – Gaston Leroux's pioneering locked room mystery, The Mystery of the Yellow Room , begins to be serialized in L'Illustration, Paris.
• November – While tutoring a Trieste businessman in English, James Joyce reveals that he is a writer, and his pupil, known to Joyce as Ettore Schmitz, proves to be the published novelist Italo Svevo. A literary friendship ensues.

• A deluxe edition of Margarete Böhme's Tagebuch einer Verlorenen published in Berlin marks 100,000 copies in print.
• Éditions Grasset is established in Paris.
• Thomas Mofolo's Moeti oa bochabela appears as the first work of literature in the Sotho language.
• Hélène van Zuylen leaves her partner Renée Vivien for another woman. Vivien's volume of love poetry Flambeaux éteints is published this year.

  New books

Fiction

• Sholom Aleichem – From Home to America, first part of Motl, Peysi the Cantor's Son: The Writings of an Orphan Boy
• Guillaume Apollinaire – Les Onze Mille Verges
• Arnold Bennett -The City of Pleasure
• André Billy – Benoni
• Mary Elizabeth Braddon – Dead Love Has Chains
• Joseph Conrad – The Secret Agent
• Jeffery Farnol – My Lady Caprice
• E. M. Forster – The Longest Journey
• Elinor Glyn – Three Weeks
• Ian Hay – Pip
• Robert Hichens – Barbary Sheep
• Roy Horniman – Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal
• William Dean Howells – Through the Eye of the Needle
• Gaston Leroux – The Mystery of the Yellow Room
• Liu E – The Travels of Lao Can
• Arthur Machen – The Hill of Dreams
• Octave Mirbeau – La 628-E8
• Baroness Orczy
• *Beau Brocade
• *The Tangled Skein
• Ferdynand Antoni Ossendowski – W ludskoi pyli
• Emilio Salgari – Sandokan to the Rescue
• Upton Sinclair – The Overman
• Edith Wharton – Madame de Treymes
• Owen Wister – The Seven Ages of Washington
• P. G. Wodehouse – Not George Washington
• Harold Bell Wright – The Shepherd of the Hills

  Children and young people

• Among Gnomes and Trolls
• L. Frank Baum
• *Father Goose's Year Book
• *Ozma of Oz
• *Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad
• *Policeman Bluejay
• E. Nesbit – The Enchanted Castle
• Beatrix Potter – The Tale of Tom Kitten

  Drama