1905 in literature

The year 1905 in literature involved some significant new books.

Events

 * L. Frank Baum's Animal Fairy Tales are published in The Delineator magazine from January to September.
 * The first of several chapters of I Am a Cat (吾輩は猫である) by Natsume Sōseki are published serially in Hototogisu.
 * Neil Munro begins publishing his Vital Spark stories in the Glasgow Evening News.

New books

 * Edwin Lester Linden Arnold - Lieutenant Gullivar Jones: His Vacation
 * L. Frank Baum - Queen Zixi of Ix
 * Margarete Böhme - The Diary of a Lost Girl
 * - The Fate of a Crown (as "Schuyler Staunton")
 * Rhoda Broughton - A Waif's Progress
 * Frances Hodgson Burnett - A Little Princess
 * Mary Boykin Chesnut - A Diary from Dixie
 * Arthur Conan Doyle - The Return of Sherlock Holmes
 * Antonio Fogazzaro - The Saint
 * E. M. Forster - Where Angels Fear to Tread
 * W. H. Hudson - A Little Boy Lost
 * Jack London - White Fang
 * Heinrich Mann - Professor Unrat
 * George Moore - The Lake
 * Baroness Orczy - The Scarlet Pimpernel
 * The Case of Miss Elliot
 * By the Gods Beloved
 * Hjalmar Söderberg - Doctor Glas
 * Mark Twain - King Leopold's Soliloquy
 * Jules Verne - Invasion of the Sea
 * The Lighthouse at the End of the World
 * Mary Augusta Ward - The Marriage of William Ashe
 * H.G. Wells - Kipps
 * Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth

New drama

 * Harley Granville-Barker - The Voysey Inheritance
 * Sacha Guitry - Nono
 * J.M. Synge - ''The Well of the Saints

Non-fiction

 * G. K. Chesterton
 * Heretics
 * Orthodoxy

Births

 * January 6 - Idris Davies, Anglo-Welsh poet (d. 1953)
 * January 31 - John O'Hara, writer (d. 1970)
 * February 2 - Ayn Rand, author (d. 1982)
 * February 7 - Paul Nizan, author (d. 1940)
 * February 11 - Elizabeth Vuyk, Dutch/Indonesian writer
 * March 31 - Kulap Saipradit (pen name Siburapha), Thai novelist (d. 1974)
 * May 16 - H. E. Bates, novelist (d. 1974)
 * May 20 - Gerrit Achterberg, Dutch poet (d. 1962)
 * May 24 - Mikhail Sholokhov, Soviet/Russian novelist (d. 1984)
 * June 20 - Lillian Hellman, dramatist (d. 1984)
 * June 21 - Jean-Paul Sartre, French author (d. 1980)
 * July 25 - Elias Canetti, novelist (d. 1994)
 * September 5 - Arthur Koestler, novelist and social philosopher (d. 1983)
 * October 15 - C. P. Snow, novelist (d. 1980)
 * December 4 - Munro Leaf, children's author (d. 1974)
 * December 21 - Anthony Powell, British novelist, (d. 2000)
 * December 22 - Kenneth Rexroth, American poet and critic (d. 1982)

Deaths

 * January 19 - Debendranath Tagore, philosopher
 * February 15 - General Lew Wallace, author of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
 * March 20 - Antonin Proust, journalist
 * March 25 - Jules Verne, author
 * May 23 - Mary Livermore, journalist
 * August 22 - David Binning Monro, expert on Homer
 * September 18 - George MacDonald, author
 * October 28 - Alphonse Allais, humorist
 * December 3 - John Bartlett, publisher
 * December 9 - Sir Richard Claverhouse Jebb classical commentator
 * December 12 - William Sharp, poet, biographer and novelist
 * December 20 - Henry Harland, novelist and editor
 * December 29 - Creeve Roe, poet
 * date unknown - R. C. Lehmann, editor of Punch magazine

Awards

 * Nobel Prize for Literature: Henryk Sienkiewicz