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20th century in literature

Overview of the events of 1900–1999 in literature

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The main periods in question are often grouped by scholars as Modernist literature, Postmodern literature, flowering from roughly 1900 to 1940 and 1960 to 1990 respectively, roughly using World War II as a transition point. After 1960, the somewhat malleable term "contemporary literature" widely appears.

Although these terms (modern, contemporary and postmodern) are generally applicable to and stem from Western literary history, scholars often use them in reference to Asian, Latin American and African literatures. Non-western writers, in particular in Postcolonial literature, have been at the forefront of literary evolution during the twentieth century.

Technological advances facilitated lower production cost for books, coupled with rising populations and literacy rates, which resulted in a significant rise in production of popular literature and trivial literature, comparable to the similar developments in music. The division of "popular literature" and "high literature" in the 20th century is overlapped by genres such as detectives or science fiction, despite being largely ignored by mainstream literary criticism for most of the century. These genres developed their own establishments and critical awards; these include the Nebula Award (since 1965), the British Fantasy Award (since 1971) or the Mythopoeic Awards (since 1971).

Towards the end of the 20th century, electronic literature grew in importance in light of the development of hypertext and later the World Wide Web.

The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded annually throughout the century (with the exception of 1914, 1918, 1935 and 1940–1943), the first laureate (1901) being Sully Prudhomme. The New York Times Best Seller list has been published since 1942.

The best-selling literary works of the 20th century are estimated to be The Lord of the Rings (1954/55, 150 million copies), Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince, 1943, 140 million copies), Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997, 120 million copies) and And Then There Were None (1939, 115 million copies). The Lord of the Rings was also voted "book of the century" in various surveys. Perry Rhodan (1961 to present) proclaimed as the best-selling book series, with an estimated total of 1 billion copies sold.

1901–1918

The Fin de siècle movement of the Belle Époque persisted into the 20th century, but was brutally cut short with the outbreak of World War I (an effect depicted e.g. in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, published 1924). The Dada movement of 1916–1920 was at least in part a protest against the bourgeois nationalist and colonialist interests which many Dadaists believed were the root cause of the war; the movement heralded the Surrealism movement of the 1920s.

1900

Genre fiction

1901

Genre fiction

1902

Genre fiction

Plays

1903

Genre fiction

1904

Genre fiction

  • The Food of the Gods by H. G. Wells
  • The Sea-Wolf by Jack London
  • Green Mansions by William Henry Hudson (Argentina, England)

Plays

1905

1906

Genre fiction

Plays

1907

  • Bardidi by Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay (India)
  • The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
  • The Longest Journey by E. M. Forster
  • The Tanners by Robert Walser (Swiss)

Genre fiction

  • The Listener and Other Stories by Algernon Blackwood (England) – contains The Willows, one of the first 'cosmic horror' stories
  • The Hill of Dreams by Arthur Machen (England)

Plays

Poetry

1908

Genre fiction

Poetry

  • Personae by Ezra Pound (US, England, Italy) – one of the first examples of 'modernist' poetry

1909

Poetry

Plays

1910

1911

Genre fiction

1912

Genre fiction

Plays

1913

Genre fiction

  • A Prisoner in Fairyland by Algernon Blackwood – adapted into a play, it later became the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Starlight Express
  • The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu by 'Sax Rohmer' (England)

Poetry

1914

Poetry

1915

Genre fiction

  • The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (Scotland, Canada)

1916

  • A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
  • Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence – initially banned, published in 1920

Genre fiction

  • Greenmantle by John Buchan

Poetry

1917

  • Under Fire by Henri Barbusse (France, Russia)
  • Walpurgis Night by Gustav Meyrink
  • Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun
  • The Shadow-Line by Joseph Conrad
  • Caprice by Ronald Firbank
  • Devdas by Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay

Poetry

Non-fiction

1918

  • Tarr by Wyndham Lewis (Canada, England)
  • Man of Straw by Heinrich Mann (Germany)

Poetry

Non-fiction

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