1920 in literature

Events

• February 2 – Beyond the Horizon, Eugene O'Neill's second full-length play, opens with a Morosco Theatre matinée in New York City, partly as a producer's experiment and partly to quiet the actor Richard Bennett, who sought to play the lead. Reviewers hail the play and O'Neill gains fame.
• February 27 – An inaugural meeting of the Bloomsbury Group's Memoir Club is arranged by Mary MacCarthy in London.
• Spring – The poet Anton Podbevšek and others organize the Novo Mesto Spring event, the beginning of Slovenian Modernism.
• March 15 – The Blue Flame, a four-act play by George V. Hobart and John Willard after Leta Vance Nicholson, opens at the Shubert Theatre on Broadway before a year's U.S. tour. Though described by a critic as "one of the worst plays ever written," it is a commercial success, largely due to Theda Bara as the central character of a vamp.
• March 22 – Federico García Lorca's first play, The Butterfly's Evil Spell is poorly received at its première in Madrid.
• March 26 – This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald sets him up as a writer and celebrity. An initial 3,000 copies sell out in three days. The book's reputation dims in later years, but Dorothy Parker will recall that it was seen as innovative when it first appeared.
• April
• *Hart Crane publishes his poem "My Grandmother's Love Letters" in The Dial, his first major move toward recognition as a poet.
• *The pulp magazine Black Mask is launched in New York City as "An Illustrated Magazine of Detective Mystery, Adventure, Romance, and Spiritualism" by journalist H. L. Mencken and drama critic George Jean Nathan.

• April 3 – F. Scott Fitzgerald marries Zelda Sayre in the rectory of St. Patrick's Cathedral.
• May 1 – F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" appears in the Saturday Evening Post and on the magazine's cover, illustrated by artist Norman Rockwell.
• August 22 – The Salzburg Festival in Austria is inaugurated with a performance of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's play Jedermann in front of Salzburg Cathedral, directed by Max Reinhardt.
• October – Agatha Christie's first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, appears in the U.S., introducing her long-running Belgian detective Hercule Poirot in the setting of an English country house. The book is published in the U.K. on January 21, 1921.
• November 1 – Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones plays at the Playwright's Theater in New York City with Charles Sidney Gilpin in the title role.
• November 9 – D. H. Lawrence's novel Women in Love appears in a limited U.S. subscribers' edition.
• December – The first edition of the Poems of the English war poet Wilfred Owen, killed in action in 1918, appears in London, introduced by his friend Siegfried Sassoon. Only five of Owen's verses were published in his lifetime. This introduces his work to many readers. It includes the 1917 poems "Anthem for Doomed Youth" and "Dulce et Decorum est", horrifying imagery in the latter's 28 lines poem's making it one of the best-known condemnations of war.
• December 23 – Arthur Schnitzler's play Reigen receives a first authorized performance, in Berlin, where it is criticized on moral and anti-Semitic grounds.
• Christmas – Monteiro Lobato's children's story "A Menina do Narizinho Arrebitado", the origin of the Sítio do Picapau Amarelo novel series, is published in Brazil.
• unknown dates
• *Karel Čapek's drama R.U.R: Rossum's Universal Robots, published in Prague, introduces the word robot into English.
• *Publication in Paris of the first volume of the Collection Budé initiates editions of classical texts with parallel French translation: Plato's Hippias Minor .
• *Van Wyck Brooks' The Ordeal of Mark Twain controversially argues that Twain was "a victim of arrested development" with a dual personality. It begins a reassessment of one seen hitherto mainly as a humorous writer. The 1920s will bring similar reconsideration of many 19th-century American writers, notably Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson.

  New books

Fiction

• Sherwood Anderson – Poor White
• E. F. Benson – Queen Lucia
• Marjorie Bowen – The Burning Glass
• Rhoda Broughton – A Fool in Her Folly
• Emilio Carrere – The Tower of the Seven Hunchbacks
• Catherine Carswell – Open the Door!
• Agatha Christie – The Mysterious Affair at Styles
• Colette – Chéri
• Joseph Conrad – The Rescue
• William Aubrey Darlington – Alf's Button
• Miguel de Unamuno
• *Tres novelas ejemplares y un prólogo
• *Tulio Montalbán
• Grazia Deledda – Le Madre
• Ethel M. Dell – The Top of the World
• Suat Derviş – Kara Kitap
• Alfred Döblin – Wallenstein
• John Dos Passos – Three Soldiers
• Hans Fallada – Der junge Goedeschal
• F. Scott Fitzgerald – This Side Of Paradise
• Zona Gale – Miss Lulu Bett
• John Galsworthy
• *In Chancery
• *Awakening
• Edgar Jepson – The Loudwater Mystery
• D. H. Lawrence – Women in Love
• Sinclair Lewis – Main Street
• David Lindsay – A Voyage to Arcturus
• Compton Mackenzie – The Vanity Girl
• E. Phillips Oppenheim – The Great Impersonation
• Dowell Philip O'Reilly – Five Corners
• Ernest Pérochon – :fr:Nêne|Nêne
• Marcel Proust – The Guermantes Way
• Merari Siregar – Azab dan Sengsara
• Sigrid Undset – Kristin Lavransdatter
• Edgar Wallace – The Daffodil Mystery
• Mary Augusta Ward – Harvest
• Edith Wharton – The Age of Innocence
• Owen Wister – A Straight Deal
• Zara Wright – Black and White Tangled Threads
• Francis Brett Young – The Tragic Bride

  Children and young people

• L. Frank Baum – Glinda of Oz
• Edgar Rice Burroughs – Tarzan the Untamed
• R. A. H. Goodyear – Forge of Foxenby
• Hugh Lofting – The Story of Doctor Dolittle
• Olive Beaupré Miller – In the Nursery
• Opal Whiteley – The Story of Opal: The Journal of an Understanding Heart

  Drama