1908 in literature

See also: 1907 in literature, other events of 1908, 1909 in literature, list of years in literature.

Events

• June 18 – Mark Twain purchases a house in Redding, Connecticut.
• The Maurice Maeterlinck play, L'Oiseau bleu (The Blue Bird) debuts.
• The Old Wives' Tale by Arnold Bennett is published.

New books

• All Things Considered – G. K. Chesterton
• Anne of Green Gables – Lucy Maude Montgomery
• Arnoul the Englishman  – Francis Aveling
• A Battle in the Smoke  – Louisa Cooke Don Carlos
• Buried Alive – Arnold Bennett
• During Her Majesty's Pleasure – Mary Elizabeth Braddon
• Holy Orders – Marie Corelli
• The House On the Borderland – William Hope Hodgson
• The Iron Heel – Jack London
• John Silence, Physician Extraordinary – Algernon Blackwood
• The Magician  – W. Somerset Maugham
• Mamma – Rhoda Broughton
• The Man Who Was Thursday – G. K. Chesterton
• A Modern Utopia – H. G. Wells
• My Double Life – Sarah Bernhardt
• The Old Wives' Tale – Arnold Bennett
• Penguin Island – Anatole France
• A Room with a View – E. M. Forster
• The Seven Who Were Hanged – Leonid Andreyev
• The Shoulders of Atlas – Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
• The Tale of Jemina Puddle-Duck – Beatrix Potter
• The Testing of Diana Mallory – Mary Augusta Ward
• Three lives – Gertrude Stein
• The War in the Air – H.G. Wells
• War of the Classes  – Jack London
• The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

Births

• January 9 – Simone de Beauvoir, feminist philosopher
• February 8 – Emil Staiger, scientist of literature (d. 1987)
• February 11 – Sutan Takdir Alishahbana, Indonesian linguistic/author/novelist.
• March 22 – Louis L'Amour, author
• May 25 – Theodore Roethke, American poet
• May 28 – Ian Fleming, author
• September 4 – Richard Wright, author (d. 1960)
• November 28 – Claude Lévi-Strauss

Deaths

• January 25 – Ouida, writer
• April 20 – Henry Chadwick, baseball writer and historian
• July 3, 1908 – Joel Chandler Harris

Awards

• Nobel Prize for Literature: Rudolf Christoph Eucken