March 26 –This Side of Paradise byF. 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, butDorothy Parker will recall that it was seen as innovative when it first appeared.
April
Hart Crane publishes his poem "My Grandmother's Love Letters" inThe Dial, his first major move toward recognition as a poet.
July –Krishna Lal Adhikari'sMakaiko Kheti (The Cultivation of Maize) is published inNepal; following claims that it contains "mischievous expressions to treason", the author is sentenced on August 2 to nine years in prison (where he will die in 1923) and all known copies of the book are destroyed.[5]
December – The first edition of thePoems of the Englishwar poetWilfred Owen, killed in action in1918, appears in London, introduced by his friendSiegfried Sassoon but with much of the editing carried out byEdith Sitwell. Only five of Owen's verses having been published in his lifetime, the collection introduces his work to many readers. It includes the1917 poems "Anthem for Doomed Youth" and "Dulce et Decorum est", one of the best-known poetic condemnations of war.[9]
Erwin von Busse, using the pseudonym Granand, publishesDas erotische Komödiengärtlein (Berlin Garden of Erotic Delights), a collection of short stories about sexually charged encounters between men. It is promptly banned.[11]
Publication in Paris of the first volume of theCollection Budé initiates editions of classical texts with parallel French translation:Plato'sHippias Minor (Hippias Mineur).[14]
Van Wyck Brooks'The Ordeal of Mark Twain controversially argues thatTwain was "a victim of arrested development" with a dual personality.[15] It begins a reassessment of an author seen hitherto mainly as a humorous writer. The 1920s will bring similar reconsideration of many 19th-century American writers, notablyHerman Melville[16] andEmily Dickinson.[17]
^Auster, Paul (ed.) (1982).The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry, with Translations by American and British Poets. New York: Random House.ISBN978-0-394-52197-8.
