1924 in literature
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1924.
Events
- January
- *Writer Miguel de Unamuno is dismissed for the first time from his university posts by the Spanish dictator General Miguel Primo de Rivera and goes into exile on Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands.
- *Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster establish the New York City publisher Simon & Schuster, which initially specializes in crossword puzzle books.
- January 15 – The world's first radio play, Danger by Richard Hughes, is broadcast by the B.B.C. from its London studios.
- February 2 – A largely rewritten version of Roi Cooper Megrue and Walter C. Hackett's 1914 farce It Pays to Advertise opens in a production by actor-manager Tom Walls, at the Aldwych Theatre in London. It runs until 10 July 1925, a total of 598 performances, as the first in a sequence of twelve Aldwych farces.
- March 3 – Seán O'Casey's drama Juno and the Paycock opens at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin.
- March
- *Leonard and Virginia Woolf move themselves and the Hogarth Press back to a house in Bloomsbury at 52 Tavistock Square, London.
- *Weird Tales magazine publishes H. P. Lovecraft's story "The Rats in the Walls" in the United States.
- April – Ford Madox Ford publishes the first of four volumes set around World War I, titled Parade's End. It is completed in 1928.
- April 12 – The Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore arrives in China, where his views prove controversial. While there, he becomes associated with the innovative poets Xu Zhimo and Lin Huiyin.
- May 3 – F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald leave New York for France.
- June 4 – E. M. Forster's novel A Passage to India is published in the U.K. He will write no further fiction in the remaining 46 years of his life.
- September – Buddenbrooks, the first of Thomas Mann's works to appear in English, is published in a translation by the American Helen T. Lowe-Porter. The original German appeared in 1901.
- The Hebrew language poet Hayim Nahman Bialik relocates with his publishing house Dvir from Berlin to Tel Aviv.
- Ret Marut, perhaps previously Otto Feige and presumed later to be the writer B. Traven, leaves Europe for Mexico.
- The Argosy Book Store is founded in New York City.
New books
Fiction
- Felix Aderca – Moartea unei republici roșii
- Michael Arlen – The Green Hat
- Henry Howarth Bashford – Augustus Carp, Esq., By Himself: Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man
- Johan Bojer – Vor egen stamme
- Louis Bromfield – The Green Bay Tree
- John Buchan – The Three Hostages
- Edgar Rice Burroughs
- *The Land That Time Forgot
- *Tarzan and the Ant Men
- Agatha Christie
- *The Man in the Brown Suit
- *Poirot Investigates
- James Oliver Curwood – A Gentleman of Courage
- Alfred Döblin – Berge Meere und Giganten
- Johan Fabricius – De Scheepsjongens van Bontekoe
- Edna Ferber – So Big
- Charles Finger – Tales from Silver Lands
- Dorothy Canfield Fisher – The Home-Maker
- Ford Madox Ford – Some Do Not...
- Jean Forge – Saltego trans Jarmiloj
- E. M. Forster – A Passage to India
- Gilbert Frankau – Gerald Cranston's Lady
- John Galsworthy – The White Monkey
- Garet Garrett – Satan's Bushel
- Zane Grey – Call of the Canyon
- Robert Hichens – After the Verdict
- Winifred Holtby – The Crowded Street
- Margaret Irwin – Still She Wished for Company
- Mikheil Javakhishvili
- *Jaqo's Dispossessed
- *Kvachi Kvachantiradze
- Harry Stephen Keeler – The Voice of the Seven Sparrows
- Margaret Kennedy – The Constant Nymph
- Magdalen King-Hall – Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion 1764–65
- Halldór Laxness – Undir Helgahnúk
- Benito Lynch – The Englishman of the Bones
- Philip MacDonald – The Rasp
- Thomas Mann – The Magic Mountain
- Lucia Mantu – Cucoana Olimpia
- Katherine Mansfield – Something Childish and Other Stories
- John Masefield – Sard Harker
- F. M. Mayor – The Rector's Daughter
- Herman Melville – Billy Budd, Sailor
- Dmitry Merezhkovsky – Akhnaton, King of Egypt
- George Moore – Peronnik the Fool
- Paul Morand – Lewis and Irene
- Ralph Hale Mottram – The Spanish Farm
- E. Phillips Oppenheim – The Wrath to Come
- Baroness Orczy
- *The Honourable Jim
- *Pimpernel and Rosemary
- *Les Beaux et les Dandys de Grand Siècles en Angleterre
- Ernest Pérochon – :fr:Les Gardiennes |Les Gardiennes
- Eden Phillpotts – The Treasures of Typhon
- Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany – The King of Elfland's Daughter
- Joseph Roth
- *Hotel Savoy
- *Rebellion
- Arthur Schnitzler – Fräulein Else
- Arthur D. Howden Smith – Porto Bello Gold
- Þórbergur Þórðarson – Bréf til Láru
- Edgar Wallace
- *The Dark Eyes of London
- *Double Dan
- *The Face in the Night
- *Room 13
- *The Sinister Man
- *The Three Oak Mystery
- Hugh Walpole – The Old Ladies
- Mary Webb – Precious Bane
- H. G. Wells – The Dream
- Edith Wharton – The Old Maid
- Walter F. White – The Fire In The Flint
- P. C. Wren – Beau Geste
- Francis Brett Young
- *Cold Harbour
- *Woodsmoke
- Yevgeny Zamyatin – We
Children and young people
- Edgar Rice Burroughs
- *The Land That Time Forgot
- *Tarzan and the Ant Men
- Hugh Lofting – Doctor Dolittle's Circus
- Anne Parrish – The Dream Coach
- Else Ury
- *Nesthäkchen's Youngest
- *Nesthäkchen and Her Grandchildren
- Ruth Plumly Thompson – Grampa in Oz
- Gertrude Chandler Warner – The Box-Car Children
Drama
- Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings – What Price Glory?
- Louis Aragon – Backs to the Wall
- Bertolt Brecht – The Life of Edward II of England
- Mikhail Bulgakov – The Fatal Eggs
- :it:Alberto Casella|Alberto Casella – :it:La morte in vacanza |La morte in vacanza
- Noël Coward
- *The Vortex
- *Hay Fever
- *Easy Virtue
- Ramón del Valle-Inclán – Bohemian Lights
- Nikolai Erdman – :ru:Мандат |The Mandate
- Ian Hay – The Sport of Kings
- Agha Hashar Kashmiri – Aankh ka Nasha
- George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly – Beggar on Horseback
- Frederick Lonsdale
- *The Fake
- *The Street Singer
- Ivor Novello – The Rat
- Seán O'Casey – Juno and the Paycock
- Eugene O'Neill – Desire Under the Elms
- Henrik Rytter – Herman Ravn
- Githa Sowerby – The Stepmother
- Sergei Tretyakov – The Gas Masks
- Tristan Tzara – Handkerchief of Clouds
- Sutton Vane – Falling Leaves
- Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz – The Mother
Poetry
- Edwin James Brady – The Land of the Sun
- Muhammad Iqbal – Bang-i-Dara
- A. A. Milne – When We Were Very Young
- Pablo Neruda – Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
- Saint-John Perse – Anabase
- Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo – La Coupe de cendres
Non-fiction
- Alfred Rosling Bennett – London and Londoners in the 1850s and 1860s
- Sarah Bernhardt – The Art of the Theatre
- W. E. B. Du Bois – The Gift of Black Folk
- Emma Goldman – My Further Disillusionment in Russia
- Johan Huizinga – Erasmus
- Agnes Mure Mackenzie – The Women in Shakespeare's Plays
- Eileen Power – Medieval People
- Robert Athlyi Rogers – Holy Piby
- Jadunath Sarkar – History of Aurangzib
- Lowell Thomas – With Lawrence in Arabia
- Leon Trotsky – Literature and Revolution
- Jim Tully – Beggars of Life
- Mark Twain – The Autobiography of Mark Twain
- Hugh Walpole – The English Novel: Some Notes on its Evolution
- H. G. Wells – The Story of a Great Schoolmaster
- Margaret Wylie – Golden Wattle Cookery Book
Births
- January 30 – Lloyd Alexander, American writer
- February 3 – Andrzej Szczypiorski, Polish writer
- February 6 – Jin Yong, Chinese wuxia novelist
- February 17 – Margaret Truman, novelist
- April 3 – Josephine Pullein-Thompson, English children's novelist
- April 8 – Humberto Costantini, Argentinian writer
- April 24
- *Clement Freud, German-born English writer and broadcaster
- *Clive King, English children's writer and academic
- April 26 – Solomon Mutswairo, Zimbabwean novelist and poet
- May 1 – Terry Southern, American writer
- May 8 – Petru Dumitriu, Romanian novelist
- July 15 – Finn Bjørnseth, Norwegian novelist
- July 30 – José Antonio Villarreal, Chicano novelist
- August 3 – Leon Uris, American author
- August 6 – James Baldwin, American writer
- August 15 – Robert Bolt, English screenwriter and playwright
- August 17 – Evan S. Connell, American author
- August 22 – Ada Jafri, Indian poet writing in Urdu
- September 4 – Joan Aiken, English novelist
- September 27 – Josef Škvorecký, Czech-born novelist and publisher
- September 30 – Truman Capote, American fiction writer
- October 1 – Jimmy Carter, author and 39th President of the United States
- October 3 – Harvey Kurtzman, American cartoonist and editor
- October 5 – José Donoso, Chilean writer
- October 29 – Zbigniew Herbert, Polish writer
- November 21 – Christopher Tolkien, British academic and editor
- November 22 – Rosamunde Pilcher, English novelist
- December 29 – Francisco Nieva, Spanish playwright, novelist and short story writer
- Deirdre Cash, Australian novelist
- Mengistu Lemma, Ethiopian playwright
Deaths
- April 21 – Marie Corelli, English author
- May 4 – E. Nesbit, English children's author
- June 3 – Franz Kafka, German-language author
- June 30 – Jacob Israël de Haan, Dutch-Jewish novelist, poet and journalist
- October 9
- *Valery Bryusov, Russian Symbolist poet, dramatist and translator
- *Lin Shu, Chinese translator
- October 13 – Anatole France, French poet, novelist and journalist
- October 25 – Laura Jean Libbey, American novelist
- November 21 – Paul Milliet, French dramatist and librettist
- November 22 – Herman Heijermans, Dutch dramatist
- December 6 – Gene Stratton Porter, American novelist and naturalist
- December 26 – Arnold Henry Savage Landor, English writer and artist
Awards
- James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: E. M. Forster, A Passage to India
- James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: Rev. William Wilson, The House of Airlie
- Newbery Medal for children's literature: Charles Hawes, The Dark Frigate
- Nobel Prize in Literature: Władysław Reymont
- Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Hatcher Hughes, Hell-Bent Fer Heaven
- Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Robert Frost, New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes
- Pulitzer Prize for the Novel: Margaret Wilson, The Able McLaughlins