Modern Literature Time Chart

Date

A selection of publications

Historic and political events

Social history

1914

Theodore Dreiser: The Titan
James Elroy Flecker: The King of Alsander
Robert Frost: North of Boston
Thomas Hardy: Satires of Circumstances
Henry James: Notes of a Son and Brother
James Joyce: Dubliners
Joyce Kilmer: Trees and Other Poems
D H Lawrence: The Prussian Officer
Sinclair Lewis: Our Mr. Wrenn
Carl Sandburg: Chicago
W B Yeats: Responsibilities

WWI: Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand assassinated in Sarajevo by Serbian gunman. First World War starts. First Battle of Ypres.
UK: Irish Home Rule Bill passed, warnings of possible civil war.
Panama: Canal opened.

UK: Suffragettes protest for votes for women. Huge recruitment campaign for the Army. Art: Blast, manifesto of Vorticist group published by Wyndham Lewis. Classical music: Vaughan Williams London Symphony.

1915

Rupert Brooke: 1914 and Other Poems
Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark
Joseph Conrad: Victory
Theodore Dreiser: The Genius
T S Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Ford Madox Ford: The Good Soldier
D H Lawrence: The Rainbow
W Somerset Maugham: Of Human Bondage
Ezra Pound: Cathay
Isaac Rosenberg:Night and Day
Herbert Read: Songs of Chaos
Dorothy Richardson: Pointed Roofs
Edith Sitwell: The Mother and Other Poems
Virginia Woolf: The Voyage Out

WWI: Second Battle of Ypres. Germans use poison gas for first time. Sinking of SS Lusitania. Dardanelles Campaign - to Jan 1916.
USA: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People boycotts the film Birth of a Nation.

UK: Government appeals for women to work in factories to help war effort. Emmiline Pankhurst calls off suffragette campaign. Lawrence's The Rainbow withdrawn and destroyed. Science: Einstein proposes General Theory of Relativity (in addition to the Special Theory of Relativity of 1905). Cinema: D W Griffith, Birth of a Nation.

1916

Sherwood Anderson: Windy McPherson's Son
Harold Brighouse: Hobson's Choice
Hilda Doolittle (H D): Sea Garden
Robert Frost: Mountain Interval
Wilfrid Wilson Gibson: Battle, and Other Poems
James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Ring Lardner: You Know Me
D H Lawrence: Amores
Katherine Mansfield: Prelude
Eugene O'Neill: Bound East
Ezra Pound: Lustra
Charles Hamilton Sorley:Marlborough and Other Poems
Mark Twain: The Mysterious Stranger

WWI: Battle of the Somme. Gallipoli Campaign.
UK: David Lloyd George appointed Prime Minister. Lord Kitchener killed at sea by mine.
USA: President Wilson calls for a 'league of nations'.
Ireland: Easter rising, rebels executed, Roger Casement hung.
Russia: Rasputin murdered.

UK: Conscription introduced. Daylight saving time introduced. Art: Start of Dada movement in Zurich. European influence: Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis. Popular music: The term Jazz starting to be used

1917

J M Barrie: Dear Brutus
T S Eliot: Prufrock and Other Observations
Wilfred Wilson Gibson: Livelihood
Robert Graves: Fairies and Fusiliers
Ivor Gurney: Severn and Somme
Thomas Hardy: Moments of Vision
Ralph Hodgson: Poems
D H Lawrence: Look! We have Come Through!
Sinclair Lewis: The Job
Edna St. Vincent Millay: Renascence and Other Poems
Robert Nichols: Ardours and Endurances
Siegfried Sassoon: The Old Huntsman
George Bernard Shaw: Heartbreak House
Edward Thomas: Poems
Alec Waugh: The Loom of Youth
Edith Wharton: Summer

WWI: Third Battle of Ypres, Passchendaele.
T E Lawrence's campaigns in Arabia.
USA declares war on Germany, sends forces to Europe.
UK: Balfour declaration on establishment of Jewish state.
USA: East Saint Louis Race riot.
Russia: Mar: First Russian Revolution - Tsar abdicates. Nov: Bolshevik Revolution led by Lenin - Soviet Federative Socialist Republics created.

UK: Royal family adopts name House of Windsor. Art: France: Parade a circus ballet by Jean Cocteau, designed by Picasso, music by Erik Satie. Appolinaire describes it as ‘Surrealism’. Holland: ‘De Stijl’ movement, Piet Mondrian. UK: Paul Nash, We are making a new world. USA: Start of Pulitzer Prizes. Start of draft. Death of William Cody, 'Buffalo Bill'.

1918

Rupert Brooke: Collected Poems
Willa Cather: My Ántonia
Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems, edited by Robert Bridges
Aldous Huxley: The Defeat Of Youth
James Joyce: Exiles
D H Lawrence: New Poems
Katherine Mansfield: Prelude
Ezra Pound: Pavannes and Divagations
Siegfried Sassoon: Counter-Attack
Lytton Strachey: Eminent Victorians
Booth Tarkington: The Magnificent Ambersons
Edward Thomas: Last Poems
Edith Wharton: The Marne

WWI: Mar: Second Battle of the Somme, 'Red Baron' shot down.
Nov: Armistice ends First World War.

Influenza pandemic begins.

UK: Women over 30 get vote. Married Love by Dr Marjorie Stopes published. Food rationing. Art: Imperial War Museum commissions paintings of the war. European influence: Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author.Classical music: Holst The Planets first performed.Popular music: First US Jazz band visits UK

1919

Sherwood Anderson: Winesburg, Ohio
Joseph Conrad: The Shadow Line
T S Eliot: Poems
John Galsworthy: A Saint's Progress
Ivor Gurney: War's Embers
W Somerset Maugham: The Moon and Sixpence
Ezra Pound: Homage to Sextus Propertius
Herbert Read: Naked Warriors
Carl Sandburg: Cornhuskers
Siegfried Sassoon: War Poems
Virginia Woolf: Night and Day
W B Yeats: The Wild Swans at Coole

Treaty of Versailles. Many monarchies replaced by republics.
League of Nations created. Influenza kills millions in Europe.
USA: Chicago race riots and Ku Klux Klan lynchings.
Ireland: Rebellion led by Sinn Fein. Lloyd George announces partition plan.
Italy: Mussolini forms Fascist party.
India: Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

UK: Nancy Astor first woman MP. Technology: Splitting of the atom by Rutherford. Air service links London and Paris. First flight across Atlantic. Art: Bauhaus founded by Gropius. European influence: Marcel Proust wins Prix Goncourt. Hermann Hesse, Demian. Cinema: Fritz Lang, Das Kabinet den Doktor Caligari. United Artists formed.