1915 in literature

Events

• January 13 – "Reminiscences of Sergeant Michael Cassidy", the first known story by Captain H. C. McNeile, Royal Engineers, writing as "Sapper", begins in the Daily Mail.
• February 28 – Rupert Brooke sails with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, but develops sepsis from an infected mosquito bite. This ends with his death in a hospital ship off Skyros. His collection 1914 & Other Poems, including the sonnet "The Soldier", appears posthumously in May.
• March – Ford Madox Ford's novel The Good Soldier: A tale of passion is published by John Lane – The Bodley Head in London under this title, and under the author's original name, Ford Madox Hueffer, although he had intended it to be called The Saddest Story.
• March 26 – Virginia Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out, is published in London by the firm of her half-brother, Gerald Duckworth.
• April 6 – The American Ezra Pound's poetry collection Cathay, "translations... for the most part of the Chinese of Rihaku, from the notes of the late Ernest Fenollosa, and the decipherings of the Professors Mori and Ariga", by Elkin Mathews, is published in London.
• April 24 – Deportation begins of Armenian notables from Istanbul. Among the literary deportees killed in the Armenian genocide are Dikran Chökürian, Armen Dorian, Melkon Giurdjian, Ardashes Harutiunian, Jacques Sayabalian, Ruben Sevak, Siamanto, Rupen Zartarian and actor Yenovk Shahen. Survivors include Yervant Odian and Alexander Panossian.
• May 3 – The rondeau "In Flanders Fields" by the Canadian poet John McCrae appears on December 8 in the London magazine Punch.
• May 7 – The Sinking of the RMS Lusitania claims 1,198 victims. The Americans among them in this torpedo attack on a civilian passenger liner include the writer and playwright Justus Miles Forman, the theatrical producer Charles Frohman, the writer and philosopher Elbert Hubbard and his second wife Alice Moore Hubbard, and the playwright Charles Klein. The survivors include the British-born writer and educator Ian Holbourn and the bookseller Charles E. Lauriat, Jr.
• May 13 – As Julian Grenfell stands talking with other officers, a shell lands some yards away and a splinter hits him in the head. He is taken to a hospital in Boulogne, where he dies 13 days later. His poem "Into Battle" is published in The Times the following day. His younger brother Gerald William Grenfell is killed in action two months later.
• c. May – Publication of the first modern book illustrated with wood engravings, Frances Cornford's Spring Morning, from the Poetry Bookshop, London, has engravings by her cousin Gwen Raverat.
• June 24 – The Widener Library at Harvard University is dedicated.
• June 26 – August 14 – P. G. Wodehouse's novel Something Fresh is serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, introducing the character of Lord Emsworth of Blandings Castle. It first appears in book form on September 3 in New York, from D. Appleton & Company, and on September 16 in London, from Methuen.
• August/September – John Buchan's thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps, set just before the outbreak of war and introducing as hero Richard Hannay, is serialised in Blackwood's Magazine. Book publication follows in October by William Blackwood and Sons in Edinburgh.
• August–December – Ezra Pound completes the early sections of his poem The Cantos.
• September 15 – P. G. Wodehouse's story "Extricating Young Gussie" is published in The Saturday Evening Post. It introduces as characters Jeeves and Bertie.
• September 30 – D. H. Lawrence's novel The Rainbow is prosecuted on its appearance in London under the Obscene Publications Act 1857, and suppressed by his publisher, Methuen. The U.S. edition appears in November without any legal challenge.
• October – Franz Kafka's seminal novella The Metamorphosis is first published in Die Weißen Blätter. Kafka finishes writing The Trial this year, but it will not be published until 1925, the year after his death.
• October 15 – Detective Story Magazine is first published by Street & Smith of New York, a successor to Nick Carter Stories.
• November – The German author Heinrich Mann's essay on Émile Zola in Die Weißen Blätter marks Zola's political commitment and attacks the economic causes of the war. This temporarily disrupts Mann's relations with his younger brother, the novelist Thomas Mann.
• unknown dates
• James Joyce, Tristan Tzara and Vladimir Lenin all take up residence in Zurich, in a coincidence to be exploited in Tom Stoppard's 1974 play Travesties.
• Alfred A. Knopf, Sr. establishes the publishers Alfred A. Knopf in New York City.
• The Goudy Old Style serif typeface is created by Frederic Goudy for American Type Founders.

  New books

Fiction

• Ryūnosuke Akutagawa – "Rashōmon"
• Victor Appleton – Tom Swift and His Aerial Warship
• Ruby M. Ayres – Richard Chatterton, V.C.
• Mariano Azuela – The Underdogs
• E. F. Benson – The Oakleyites
• Stella Benson – I Pose
• John Buchan – The Thirty-nine Steps
• Willa Cather – The Song of the Lark
• Joseph Conrad – Victory
• Arthur Conan Doyle – The Valley of Fear
• Theodore Dreiser – The "Genius"
• Caradoc Evans – My People: Stories of the Peasantry of West Wales
• Edna Ferber – Emma Mc Chesney and Co.
• Ronald Firbank – Vainglory
• Ford Madox Hueffer – The Good Soldier
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman – Herland
• Anna Katharine Green – The Golden Slipper, and Other Problems for Violet Strange
• Hermann Hesse – Knulp
• Franz Kafka – The Metamorphosis
• D. H. Lawrence – The Rainbow
• Jack London – The Little Lady of the Big House
• Arthur Machen
• Compton Mackenzie – Guy and Pauline
• *The Bowmen; and Other Legends of the War
• *The Great Return
• W. Somerset Maugham – Of Human Bondage
• Oscar Micheaux – The Forged Note: A Romance Of The Darker Races
• Mori Ōgai – Sansho the Steward
• John Muir
• *Travels to Alaska
• *Letters to A Friend
• Natsume Sōseki – Grass on the Wayside
• E. Phillips Oppenheim – The Game of Liberty
• Baroness Orczy
• *A Bride of the Plains
• *The Bronze Eagle
• P. D. Ouspensky – Strange Life of Ivan Osokin
• Eleanor H. Porter – Pollyanna Grows Up
• Dorothy Richardson – Pointed Roofs
• Sax Rohmer – The Yellow Claw
• Rafael Sabatini – The Sea Hawk
• Ruth Sawyer – The Primrose Ring
• Edgar Wallace
• * The Man Who Bought London
• * The Melody of Death
• Jean Webster – Dear Enemy
• H. G. Wells – Boon
• Luang Wilatpariwat – Khwam mai phayabat
• Harry Leon Wilson – Ruggles of Red Gap
• P. G. Wodehouse
• *Something Fresh
• *Psmith, Journalist
• Virginia Woolf – The Voyage Out

  Children and young people

• Gerdt von Bassewitz – Peter and Anneli's Journey to the Moon
• L. Frank Baum
• *The Scarecrow of Oz
• *Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross
• Waldemar Bonsels – Himmelsvolk
• Frances Hodgson Burnett – The Lost Prince
• Edgar Rice Burroughs – The Return of Tarzan
• Russell Thorndike –
• Else Ury
• *Nesthäkchen's First School Year
• *Nesthäkchen in the Children's Sanitorium

  Drama