1901 in literature

The year 1901 in literature involved some significant new books.

Events

 * First Nobel Prize for Literature awarded, to French poet Sully Prudhomme; many are outraged when Leo Tolstoy does not win
 * October 23 - Mark Twain receives an honorary doctor of literature degree from Yale University. In the same month, he moves to Riverdale, New York
 * December 2 - the Romanian literary review Sămănătorul is founded
 * G. K. Chesterton marries Frances Blogg.
 * Anton Chekhov marries Olga Leonardovna Knipper
 * Collapse of the Irish Literary Theatre

New books

 * John Kendrick Bangs - Mr. Munchausen
 * L. Frank Baum - American Fairy Tales
 * - The Master Key
 * - Dot and Tot of Merryland
 * René Boylesve - La Becquée
 * Samuel Butler - Erewhon Revisited
 * Hall Caine - The Eternal City
 * Colette - Claudine à Paris
 * Joseph Conrad & Ford Madox Ford - The Inheritors
 * Victoria Cross - Anna Lombard
 * George Douglas - The House with the Green Shutters
 * Miles Franklin - My Brilliant Career
 * Géza Gárdonyi - A láthatatlan ember
 * Henry James - The Sacred Fount
 * Rudyard Kipling - Kim
 * Thomas Mann - Buddenbrooks
 * George Moore - Sister Theresa
 * Frank Norris - The Octopus
 * Charles-Louis Philippe - Bubu de Montparnasse
 * Luigi Pirandello - L'Esclusa
 * Beatrix Potter - The Tale of Peter Rabbit
 * José Maria de Eça de Queiroz - A Cidade e as Serras
 * Rabindranath Tagore - Nastanirh
 * Jules Verne - The Sea Serpent
 * - The Village in the Treetops
 * H. G. Wells - The First Men in the Moon
 * Emile Zola - Travail

New drama

 * Gabriele D'Annunzio - Francesca da Rimini
 * Anton Chekhov - Three Sisters
 * August Strindberg - A Dream Play

Poetry

 * Henry Ames Blood - Selected Poems of Henry Ames Blood
 * Maxim Gorky - The Song of the Stormy Petrel

Non-fiction

 * Winston Churchill - The Crisis
 * Sigmund Freud - The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
 * Edith Helen Sichel - Women and Men of the French Renaissance
 * Booker T. Washington - Up from Slavery

Births

 * January 31 - Marie Luise Kaschnitz, German writer (d. 1974)
 * February 13 - Lewis Grassic Gibbon, novelist (d. 1974)
 * February 23 - Ivar Lo-Johansson, Swedish writer (d. 1990)
 * April 10 - Anna Kavan, author (d. 1968)
 * June 1 - John Van Druten, dramatist (d. 1957)
 * July 20 - Dilys Powell, film critic (d. 1995)
 * July 25 - Ruth Krauss, children's book author and poet (d. 1993)
 * August 10 - Sergio Frusoni, poet (d. 1975)
 * August 20 - Salvatore Quasimodo, Italian author (d. 1968)
 * November 3 - André Malraux, French author (d. 1976)
 * December 9 - Ödön von Horváth, dramatist and novelist (d. 1938)
 * December 16 - Margaret Mead, cultural anthropologist and author (d. 1978)

Deaths

 * February 15 - Maurice Thompson, novelist
 * March 24 - Charlotte Mary Yonge, novelist
 * April 12 - Louis Auguste Sabatier, theologian
 * June 9 - Walter Besant, novelist
 * June 10 - Robert Williams Buchanan, writer
 * July 7 - Johanna Spyri, author
 * July 20 - William Cosmo Monkhouse, poet and critic
 * July 27 - Brooke Foss Westcott, theologian
 * October 31 - Julien Leclercq, poet and art critic
 * date unknown - Victor Balaguer, dramatist and poet

Awards

 * Nobel Prize for Literature: Sully Prudhomme