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The year 1917 in literature involved some significant events and new books.

Events

• In January, Francis Picabia produces the first issue of the Dada periodical 391 in Barcelona.
• June 4 - The very first Pulitzer Prizes are awarded: Laura E. Richards, Maude H. Elliott, and Florence Hall receive the first Pulitzer for a biography (for Julia Ward Howe). Jean Jules Jusserand receives the first Pulitzer for history for his work With Americans of Past and Present Days. Herbert B. Swope receives the first Pulitzer for journalism for his work for the New York World.
• July - Siegfried Sassoon issues his "Soldier's Declaration" and is sent by the military authorities to Craiglockhart Military Hospital in Edinburgh, where he meets Wilfred Owen.
• December 25 - Why Marry?, first dramatic play to win a Pulitzer Prize, opens at the Astor Theatre in New York City.
• The Hogarth Press is founded by Leonard and Virginia Woolf.

New books

• Henri Barbusse — Under Fire
• Adrien Bertrand — L'Orage sur le jardin de Candide
• Rhoda Broughton — A Thorn in the Flesh
• Edgar Rice Burroughs
  • A Princess of Mars
  • The Son of Tarzan
• Abraham Cahan — The Rise of David Levinsky
• Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay - Devdas
• Mary Cholmondeley — Under One Roof
• Joseph Conrad - The Shadow Line
• Norman Douglas — South Wind
• Arthur Conan Doyle — His Last Bow
• George Washington Ellis — The Leopard's Claw
• Zona Gale — A Daughter of the Morning
• Joseph Hergesheimer — The Three Black Pennys
• Ricarda Huch — The Deruga Case
• Henry James
  • The Ivory Tower (published posthumously)
  • The Sense of the Past (published posthumously)
• Sinclair Lewis — Knights of Araby
• Oscar Micheaux — The Homesteader
• Lucy Maud Montgomery - Anne's House of Dreams
• Baroness Orczy
  • Lord Tony's Wife
  • A Sheaf of Bluebells
• David Graham Phillips — Susan Lenox: Her Rise and Fall
• Marmaduke Pickthall — The Job
• Ernest Poole — His Family
• Horacio Quiroga — Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte
• Elizabeth von Arnim — Christine
• Mary Augusta Ward
  • Missing
  • Towards the Goal
• Edith Wharton — Summer
• P. G. Wodehouse
  • The Man With Two Left Feet
  • Piccadilly Jim

New drama

• Guillaume Apollinaire - The Breasts of Tiresias (first performed)
• Ferdinand Bruckner - Der Herr in den Nebeln
• Jean Cocteau - Parade
• Georg Kaiser - The Corals
• A. A. Milne - Wurzel-Flummery
• Luigi Pirandello - Right You Are If You Think You Are
• Jesse Lynch Williams - Why Marry?

Poetry

• Lascelles Abercrombie - Emblems Of Love
• T. S. Eliot - Prufrock and Other Observations
• Robert Graves - Fairies and Fusiliers
• Ivor Gurney - Somme
• William Watson - The Man Who Saw: and Other Poems Arising out of the War

Non-fiction

• Clayton Adams — Ethiopia, The Land of Promise
• Max Aitken — Canada at Flanders
• D'Arcy Thompson — On Growth and Form

Births

• February 11 - Sidney Sheldon, novelist (d. 2007)
• February 25 - Anthony Burgess, novelist (d. 1993)
• March 1 - Robert Lowell, poet (d. 1977)
• March 17 - Carlo Cassola, Italian novelist (d. 1987)
• April 9 - Johannes Bobrowski, German author (d. 1965)
• June 16 - Katharine Graham, journalist (d. 2001)
• October 24 - Denys Val Baker, Cornish writer (d. 1984)
• November 3 - Conor Cruise O'Brien, biographer and political writer (d. 2008)
• December 21 - Heinrich Böll, German author, Nobel Prize winner (d. 1985)

Deaths

• January 15 - William de Morgan, novelist
• February 16 - Octave Mirbeau, novelist and critic
• April 9
  • Edward Thomas, poet and prose writer
  • R. E. Vernède, war poet
• April 14 - L. L. Zamenhof, creator of Esperanto
• April 21 - Francis Burnand, dramatist and editor of "Punch"
• July 2 - Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, actor-manager
• July 31 - Francis Ledwidge, war poet
• July 31 - Hedd Wyn, Welsh-language poet
• November 15 - Émile Durkheim, sociologist
• November 18 - Adrien Bertrand, French novelist
• December 15 - Lady Anne Blunt, descendant of Lord Byron and wife of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

Awards

• Nobel Prize for Literature: Karl Adolph Gjellerup, Henrik Pontoppidan