Franz Kafka publishes Metamorphosis, the tale of a travelling salesman who wakes up to find himself transformed into an insect

The English writer Virginia Woolf publishes her first novel, The Voyage Out

D.H. Lawrence's novel about the Brangwen family, The Rainbow, is seized by the police as an obscene work

Secret agent Richard Hannay makes his first appearance in John Buchan's Thirty-Nine Steps

The author H.H. Munro ('Saki') is killed by a sniper's bullet on a battlefield in France

Jeeves and Bertie Wooster make their first appearance in P.G. Wodehouse's The Man with Two Left Feet

Australia Felix is the first in Henry Handel Richardson's trilogy of novels about her father

Rebecca West publishes her first novel, The Return of the Soldier

In My Antonia Willa Cather's heroine survives setbacks on the Nebraska frontier

Sherwood Anderson establishes a reputation with a collection of short stories, Winesburg, Ohio

After several less successful novels, the French writer Colette makes her reputation with Chéri

Edith Wharton publishes her best-known novel, The Age of Innocence

Sapper's patriotic hero makes his first appearance, taking on the villainous Carl Peterson in Bull-dog Drummond

The publication of Scott FitzGerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise, brings him instant success

D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love, a continuation of the family story in The Rainbow, is published first in the USA

The Belgian detective Hercule Poirot features in Agatha Christie's first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles

The American novelist Sinclair Lewis has his first major success with Main Street, an unflattering portrayal of American village life

Somerset Maugham's short story 'Rain' (in his collection The Trembling of a Leaf) introduces the lively American prostitute Sadie Thompson

D.H. Lawrence takes a house in Sydney, where he writes the bulk of his novel Kangaroo

Sinclair Lewis creates an archetypal character in George Folanshee Babbitt, a real-estate broker in the midwestern town of Zenith

Thomas Mann publishes a fragment of his Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man

The Czech novelist Jaroslav Hasek dies with his masterpiece, The Good Soldier Schweik, incomplete

The Italian novelist Italo Svevo has his first great success when The Confessions of Zeno is published in France

The gentleman detective Lord Peter Wimsey makes his first appearance in Dorothy Sayers' Whose Body?

German author Thomas Mann publishes his novel The Magic Mountain