1916 in literature

Events

• January – The Journal of Negro History is founded by Carter G. Woodson, father of "Black History" and "Negro History Week" in the United States.
• March 1 – The National Library of Wales completes its transfer to purpose-built premises in Aberystwyth.
• March 22 – J. R. R. Tolkien and Edith Bratt marry at St Mary Immaculate Roman Catholic Church, Warwick, England. They will serve as inspiration for the fictional characters Beren and Lúthien. Tolkien leaves for military service in France at the beginning of June.

• March 30 – Don Marquis introduces the characters Archy and Mehitabel in "The Sun Dial" column in The Evening Sun. Archy is a poetry-writing cockroach unable to operate the typewriter shift key; Mehitabel is a cat.
• April–June – Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry live as neighbours to D. H. and Frieda Lawrence at Higher Tregerthen, near Zennor in Cornwall.
• April 24–30 – In the Easter Rising in Ireland, members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood proclaim an Irish Republic and the Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army occupy the General Post Office and other buildings in Dublin, before surrendering to the British Army. Of the seven subsequently executed leaders of the Rising, Thomas MacDonagh, Patrick Pearse and Joseph Plunkett are poets and James Connolly a balladeer and playwright. The events are the theme of W. B. Yeats' poem "Easter, 1916", first published this September.
• May 16 – Natsume Sōseki's novel Light and Darkness begins to be serialized in the Tokyo and Osaka editions of the newspaper Asahi Shimbun, but will remain unfinished at the author's death on December 9, aged 49.
• July 1
• *The poets W. N. Hodgson, Will Streets, Gilbert Waterhouse, Henry Field, Alfred Ratcliffe, Alexander Robertson and Bernard White are among 19,000 British soldiers killed on the First day on the Somme alone. The Battle of the Somme continues until October 18, during which time American poet Alan Seeger, Irish writer Tom Kettle, English poet Edward Wyndham Tennant, English short story writer Saki and English bowler Percy Jeeves are all killed. The English writer Robert Graves, novelist Stuart Cloete, playwright/actor Arnold Ridley and artist/poet David Jones are seriously injured – Graves is for a time believed killed. Ford Madox Hueffer suffers concussion and shell shock. A. A. Milne and J. R. R. Tolkien are invalided out. The English poet Siegfried Sassoon wins the Military Cross. The Cameron Highlander Dòmhnall Ruadh Chorùna composes the Scottish Gaelic love song An Eala Bhàn in the oral literature tradition. The future U.K. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan is wounded in September's Battle of Flers–Courcelette; sheltering in a slit trench, he reads Aeschylus in the original Greek.
• *W. B. Yeats makes his fifth and final proposal of marriage to the newly widowed Maud Gonne in France.
• Summer – In the United States, 15-year-old Margaret Mitchell writes a novella called Lost Laysen in two notebooks. She will later give the manuscript to a boyfriend and the book remains lost until the mid-1990s. It is published in 1996. Meanwhile, Mitchell will go on to write Gone with the Wind.
• September – Joseph Conrad's novella The Shadow Line begins to be serialized in The English Review and the Metropolitan Magazine.
• October 6 – The poet Perpessicius loses his right arm fighting for the Romanians in a skirmish at Muratan.
• October 19 – New premises for the German National Library open in Leipzig.
• December 29 – James Joyce's semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is first published complete in book form, in New York by B. W. Huebsch.

  New books

Fiction

• Ryūnosuke Akutagawa – The Nose
• Sholom Aleichem – In America, second part of Motl, Peysi the Cantor's Son: The Writings of an Orphan Boy
• Sherwood Anderson – Windy McPherson's Son
• Ruby M. Ayres
• *The Road That Bends
• *Paper Roses
• *A Man of His Word
• *The Year After
• Henri Barbusse – Under Fire
• Arnold Bennett – These Twain
• E.F. Benson
• *David Blaize
• *Mike
• *The Freaks of Mayfair
• Adrien Bertrand – L'Appel du sol
• John Edward Bruce – The Awakening of Hezekiah Jones
• Mary Grant Bruce – Captain Jim
• Thomas Burke – Limehouse Nights
• Gilbert Cannan – Mendel: a story of youth
• Ethel M. Dell – The Bars of Iron
• Alfred Döblin – The Three Leaps of Wang Lun
• Ronald Firbank – Inclinations
• Walter Flex – :de:Der Wanderer zwischen beiden Welten|Der Wanderer zwischen beiden Welten
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman – With Her in Ourland
• Elinor Glyn – The Career of Katherine Bush
• Sarah Grand – The Winged Victory
• Louis Hemon – Maria Chapdelaine
• Hermann Hesse – Schön ist die Jugend
• William Dean Howells – The Leatherwood God
• James Joyce – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Franz Kafka – The Metamorphosis
• Frigyes Karinthy
• *Please, Sir!
• *Voyage to Faremido
• Grace King – The Pleasant Ways of St. Medard
• Ring Lardner – You Know Me Al
• Ada Leverson – Love At Second Sight
• Benito Lynch – The Caranchos of Florida
• I. I. Mironescu – Sandu Hurmuzel
• George Moore – The Brook Kerith: A Syrian Story
• Mori Ōgai – Takasebune
• Baroness Orczy – Leatherface
• Dorothy Richardson – Backwater
• Berta Ruck – In Another Girl's Shoes
• Ruth Sawyer – Seven Miles to Arden
• May Sinclair – Tasker Jevons
• Rabindranath Tagore – The Home and the World
• Booth Tarkington – Seventeen: A Tale of Youth and Summer Time and the Baxter Family Especially William
• Mark Twain – The Mysterious Stranger
• Eduard Vilde – Mäeküla piimamees
• Edgar Wallace
• *A Debt Discharged
• *The Tomb of Ts'in
• Mrs Humphry Ward – Lady Connie
• H. G. Wells – Mr. Britling Sees It Through
• Francis Brett Young – The Iron Age

  Children and young people

• L. Frank Baum
• *Rinkitink in Oz
• *Mary Louise
• Frances Hodgson Burnett - The Little Hunchback Zia
• Edgar Rice Burroughs – The Beasts of Tarzan
• Dorothy Canfield Fisher – Understood Betsy
• May Gibbs – Gumnut Babies

  Drama