1922 | Literature
Literature
Compton's Encyclopedia appears for the first time. Published at Chicago by Frank E. (Elbert) Compton, 48, and initially called Compton's Pictured Encyclopedia (the word Pictured will be dropped in 1968), the eight-volume home and school reference work is the first encylopedia to use photographs and drawings on the same page as the text they illustrate. Compton purchased publication rights to the Student's Cyclopedia 10 years ago, and Encylopaedia Britannica Inc., will acquire his products in 1961. Compton's will run to 24 volumes by 1974, and by the 1990s it will have some 5,200 articles in 25 volumes plus a one-volume Fact-Index containing 63,500 short entries and annual Compton's Yearbooks (see 1992).
Nonfiction: Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes. Umrisse einer Morphologic der Weltgeschichte) by German philosopher Oswald Spengler, 42, who predicts the eclipse of Western civilization; The Meaning of Relativity by Albert Einstein; The Principle of Relativity by Alfred North Whitehead; Invertebrate Spain (España invertebrada) by José Ortega y Gasset; Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann; Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home—The Blue Book of Social Usage by New York writer Emily (Price) Post, 48, a daughter of architect Bruce Price, who has found the manners of Americans far inferior to those of their social counterparts in Europe; My Discovery of England by Stephen Leacock includes "Have the English Any Sense of Humour" and "We Have with Us Tonight"; More Trivia by Pearsall Smith.
Psychologist-anthropologist W. H. R. Rivers dies at Cambridge June 4 at age 58; historian and syndicalist theoretician Georges Sorel at Boulogne-sur-Seine September 4 at age 74, having developed a theory about the positive role of myth and violence in history.
Fiction: Ulysses by James Joyce, whose book was serialized in the Little Review beginning in 1918 but challenged in a New York court following seizure of the serialized form. All reputable publishers have refused the stream-of-consciousness account of a day (June 16) in the lives of Dubliner Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly (it has been judged obscene in Britain as well as in America), but Baltimore-born bookseller Sylvia (Woodridge) Beach, 35, publishes it under the imprint of her Paris book shop's name Shakespeare & Co. Beach's talent for bringing French, English, and U.S. writers together is making her 3-year-old Faubourg St.-Germain-des-Prés store in the rue Dupuytren an intellectual center, and she has helped Joyce edit the disjointed manuscript that he has continued revising to the last, even adding another one-third when it was in page proofs. Hers is the only shop to carry the 1,000-copy first printing, U.S. postal officials at New York seize and burn 500 copies of a subsequent printing, but by 1933 Beach will have sold some 28,000 copies of 14 further printings. Irish critic A. E. (George William Russell) of the Irish Homestead calls Ulysses "the greatest fiction of the twentieth century," but writer-surgeon-throat specialist Oliver St. John Gogarty, 44, takes exception to being caricatured in the person of "big Buck Mulligan" (see 1933); Siddharta by Hermann Hesse, who visited India in 1911, has undergone psychoanalysis, and has developed a Jungian mixture of depth psychology and Indian mysticism to probe the fantasies of adolescents; The Bridal Canopy (Haknasath Kallah) by Hebrew novelist S. Y. (Samuel Joseph) Agnon, 44, who changed his name from Czaczkes when he moved to Palestine from his native Galicia in 1907; The Extraordinary Aventures of Julio Jurenito and His Disciples (Neobychaynyye khozhedeniya Khulio Khurenito i jego uchenikov) by Russian journalist-novelist Ilya Gregoryevich Ehrenburg, 31; The Thibaults (Les Thibault) by French paleographer-archivist-turned-novelist Roger Martin du Gard, 41, whose eight-part cycle of bourgeois life will continue until 1940; The Dream (Le Songe) by Henri de Montherlant; The Kiss to the Leper (Le Baiser au lépreux) by French novelist François Mauriac, 37; Cities of the Plain (Sodome et Gomorrhe) by Marcel Proust; The Adventures of Telemachus (L'Aventure de Télemaque) by Louis Aragon; Open All Night (Ouvert la nuit) by French diplomat-novelist Paul Morand, 34, who has served since 1912 as an attaché at London, Rome, Madrid, and Bangkok; The Enormous Room by Cambridge, Mass.-born poet E. E. (Edward Estlin) Cummings, 27, who drove an ambulance in France and served afterward in the U.S. Army (he will use only lower case letters in his poetry and sign his name "e. e. cummings"); The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald; Tales of the Jazz Age (stories) by Fitzgerald with illustrations by John Held Jr., 32; "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" (story) by Fitzgerald; Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis, who examines the conformist, complacent American businessman of Zenith, Ohio ("the best ole town in the U.S.A."), for whom "standard advertised wares . . . were his symbols and proofs of excellence; at first the signs, then the substitutes, for joy and passion and wisdom." The book introduces a new pejorative; One of Ours by Willa Cather; Merton of the Movies by Harry Leon Wilson; The Garden Party and Other Stories by Katherine Mansfield; The Cross (Korset) by Sigrid Undset completes her Kristin Lavranstatter trilogy (she will be converted to Roman Catholicism in 1924 and win the 1928 Nobel Prize for literature); Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf, whose London home is the center of the Bloomsbury Group); The Black Moth by English romance and mystery novelist Georgette Heyer, 19; Jigsaw by London post-debutante (Mary) Barbara (Hamilton) Cartland, 21, whose first novel receives a cool critical reception but goes into six editions, is translated into five languages, and launches her on a long career.
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Cartoonist John Held, Jr. portrayed the Jazz Age, sometimes teaming up with novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Novelist Giovanni Verga dies in his native Catania January 27 at age 81; Mori Ogai at Tokyo July 9 at age 60; W. H. Hudson at London August 18 at age 81 (a bird sanctuary will be established in his memory in Hyde Park in 1925); Marcel Proust dies of a pulmonary infection at his native Paris November 18 at age 51.
Poetry: The Wasteland by T. S. Eliot indicts the 20th century in a style perfected with the help of Ezra Pound. Eliot has worked at Lloyds Bank, London, since 1917, and his poem has appeared in first (October) issue of Criterion, a literary quarterly he has founded and will edit until he shuts it down in 1939. Published in book form by the 5-year-old Hogarth Press of Virginia Woolf and her husband, Leonard, Eliot's eloquent work links numerous allusions explained in lengthy notes: "April is the cruelest month, breeding/ Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/ Memory and desire, stirring/ Dull roots with spring rain"; Priapus and the Pool by Conrad Aiken; Anabasis (Anabase) by French poet-diplomat Saint-John Perse (Marie René Auguste Alexis Saint-Léger Léger), 34, whose epic poem about the Greek Xenophon of 401 B.C. has landscapes reflective of the Gobi desert through which the poet traveled while stationed in China (his work is translated by T. S. Eliot); Charmes by Paul Valéry; Around the Cape of Good Hope (Rundt Kap det Gode Haab) by Norwegian poet (Johan) Nordahl (Brun) Grieg, 19; Tristia by Osip Mandelstam, who has developed an elliptical and metaphorical language; Clouds (Moln) by Swedish poet Karin Boye, 22; Mile I (Versty I), Poems to Block (Stikhi k Bloku), The King-Maiden (Tsar' devitsa), and Parting (Razluka) by Marina Tsvetaeva; Trilce by César Vallejo; Harlem Shadows by Claude McKay, whose work helps to launch the New Negro Movement, or Harlem Renaissance.
The Fugitive magazine appears in April. The poetry monthly will continue until December 1925 with contributions by Vanderbilt University poets and writers who include John Crowe Ransom, now 33, John (Orley) Allen Tate, 22, and Robert Penn Warren, now 16.
Juvenile: The Velveteen Rabbit; or, How Toys Become Real by London-born author Margery Bianco (née Williams), 41, illustrations by English artist-writer William (Newzam Prior) Nicholson, 50; The Voyages of Dr. Dolittle by Hugh Lofting; Gerry Goes to School by English author Elinor Mary Brent-Dyer (originally Gladys Eleanor May Dyer), 28, is the first of 98 "Chalet School" girls' stories about a school in the Austrian Tyrol; Just—William (stories) by Lancashire-born schoolteacher-author Richmal Crompton (Lamburn), 31, whose anarchic schoolboy William Brown made his first appearance in a story she had published last year in The Ladies Home Magazine (she will contract poliomyelitis next year, give up teaching, and produce at least one William book per year up to 1942).
The first Newbery Medal is awarded at the annual conference of the American Library Association. R. R. Bowker Publishing Co. president Frederic G. Melcher has established the medal for the author of the most distinguished American children's book of the previous year, naming it for the 18th century English publisher John Newbery, who was among the first to publish books exclusively for youngsters (see Caldecott Award, 1938).