1917 - Literature

Literature

H. W. Wilson Co. moves from White Plains, N.Y., to the Bronx. Vermont-born publisher Halsey William Wilson, now 49, put out the first issue of his Cumulative Book Index February 1, 1898, issued the Essay and General Literature Index beginning in 1900, Book Review Digest in 1905, International Index to Periodicals in 1907, the Index to Legal Periodicals in 1908, Industrial Arts Index in 1913, and Agricultural Index in 1916. He moved to White Plains in 1913, and by the time Wilson dies in March 1954 his firm will be publishing on a cumulative basis indices to the contents of 118 periodicals but will be best known for its Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature, found in virtually every U.S. library.

The World Book Encyclopedia is published in its first edition; described on its title page as "organized knowledge in story and picture," the U.S. children's encyclopedia will have annual supplements beginning in 1922 and grow in the next 60 years to have 22 volumes, outselling every other encyclopedia.

Nonfiction: The Immigrant and the Community by Nebraska-born Chicago social worker Grace Abbott, 28, who has worked with Jane Addams at Hull House and exposed the exploitation of immigrants in a series of weekly articles for the Chicago Evening Post. Abbott goes to work at Washington, D.C., where she will head the child-labor division of the Children's Bureau until 1919; The Truth About Mexico by Philadelphia-born New York Evening Post Washington correspondent David Lawrence, 28; A Son of the Middle Border (reminiscences) by Hamlin Garland; Parnassus on Wheels by Haverford, Pa.-born essayist Christopher (Darlington) Morley, 27, is the odyssey of a horse-drawn library.

Philosopher Franz Brentano dies at Zürich March 17 at age 79; pioneer sociologist Emile Durkheim at Paris November 15 at age 59. His only son was killed last year while fighting alongside his French comrades on the Balkan front, but he has been denounced at the Sorbonne as a "professor of apparent German extraction."

Fiction: The Book of the Martyrs (Vie des Martyrs) with war stories by French novelist Denis Thévenin (Georges Duhamel), 35; Abel Sanchez (Abel Sánchez: una historia de pasión) by Miguel de Unamuno; South Wind by Norman Douglas, who has settled on Capri, the Italian island he idealizes as "Nepenthe"; Nocturne by English novelist Frank Swinnerton, 33; The Rise Of David Levinsky by Jewish Daily Forward editor Abraham Cahan; The Three Black Pennys by Joseph Hergesheimer; Regiment of Women by English novelist-playwright Clemence Dane (Winifred Ashton), 26; Gone to Earth by Mary Webb; Prelude by Katherine Mansfield, who begins to show symptoms of tuberculosis but next year will marry the critic John Middleton Murry, with whom she has lived since 1912; Platero and I (Platero y yo) by poet Juan Ramón Jiménez; A Daughter in the Morning by Milwaukee journalist-suffragist Zona Gale, 43, is a fictionalized declaration of female awareness; The Blue Envelope by Denton, Md.-born playwright-novelist Sophie Kerr, 37, whose novels will be serialized in the Saturday Evening Post and the women's magazines.

Poetry: "Prufrock and Other Observations" by T. S. Eliot appears in The Egoist, where the poet works part time as assistant editor, and expresses Eliot's disenchantment with modern life in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (see 1915); The Old Huntsman and Other Poems by English poet Siegfried (Lorraine) Sassoon, 30, who rebels against the sentimental glorification of war; "La Jeune Parque" by French poet Paul Valéry, 45, who dedicates his first great poem to André Gide and follows it with "Aurore"; The Chinese Nightingale and Other Poems by Vachel Lindsay; Merlin by Edwin Arlington Robinson; Renascence and Other Poems by Maine-born poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, 25, whose title poem appeared 5 years ago and won her a sponsor who has put her through Vassar; "To Him Who Wants It!" ("Al Que Quiere!") by William Carlos Williams; Green Fruit by Charles Town, W. Va.-born poet John Peale Bishop, 25, who obtains his bachelor's degree from Princeton and enters military service; Vision de Anáhuac by Mexican poet-diplomat Alfonso Reyes, 28; Diary of a Newlywed Poet (Diario de un Poeta Recién Casatio) by Juan Ramón Jiménez, who adopts a style of free verse; Love Songs by Sara Teasdale; The White Flock (Belaya staya) by Anna Akhmatova.

Poet-novelist Edward Thomas is killed in Flanders April 9 at age 39; English poet-critic-philosopher T. E. (Thomas Ernest) Hulme is killed in action September 28 at age 34 after 3 years with the artillery in France.

Juvenile: Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield Fisher; Anne's House of Dreams by L. M. Montgomery.