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