1932 in literature

This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1932.

Events

March – Captain W. E. Johns' character Biggles is introduced as an English World War I pilot in the short story "The White Fokker", in the first, April, issue of Popular Flying magazine, edited by Johns. The first Biggles collection, The Camels Are Coming, ensues in April.
April 23 – To mark Shakespeare's birthday:
*The Royal Shakespeare Company's new theatre opens at Stratford-upon-Avon.
*The Folger Shakespeare Library opens in Washington, D.C.
April 26 – The 32-year-old American poet Hart Crane, in a state of alcoholic depression, throws himself overboard from the Orizaba between Mexico and New York; his body is never recovered.
May – The first issue appears of the English journal of literary criticism Scrutiny: a quarterly review, edited by F. R. Leavis.
June 28 – Alice Hargreaves, the inspiration for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, meets the publisher Peter Llewelyn Davies, the inspiration for Peter Pan, at a Lewis Carroll centenary exhibition in a London bookshop.
July – W. B. Yeats leases Riversdale house in the Dublin suburb of Rathfarnham and publishes Words for Music Perhaps, and Other Poems.
Summer
*The Open Air Theatre, Regent's Park, is established as a regular venue in London by Sydney Carroll and Robert Atkins.
*The first performances at the Minack Theatre, an open-air venue on the coast of Cornwall, include The Tempest.
October 3 – The Times newspaper of London introduces the Times New Roman typeface devised by Stanley Morison.
October – Nineteen Irish writers led by Yeats and George Bernard Shaw form an Academy of Irish Letters that opposes the Censorship of Publications Board.
November 16 – Compton Mackenzie is prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act in the U.K. for material in his Greek Memories.
December
*The issue of Weird Tales magazine with this month's cover date in the United States includes Robert E. Howard's short story "The Phoenix on the Sword", the first published appearance of Conan the Barbarian.
*E. V. Knox replaces Sir Owen Seaman as editor of Punch magazine.
*Shortly after publication, the first copies of Graham Greene's novel Stamboul Train, published by Heinemann in London, are withdrawn and the text altered after a threat of libel action by J. B. Priestley.
unknown dates
*Samuel Beckett's first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, is written in Paris and rejected by several publishers.
*Serialisation of the first three volumes of Mikhail Sholokhov's novel And Quiet Flows the Don concludes in the Soviet magazine October.
*The New Poetry period begins in Vietnamese literature, marked by an article and a poem from Phan Khôi.
*Aussie: The Australian Soldiers' Magazine ceases publication.
*Una Dillon founds Dillons Booksellers in London.

New books

Poetry

W. H. Auden – The Orators
Hart Crane – The Broken Tower
Cecil Day-Lewis – From Feathers To Iron
An "Objectivist's" Anthology
Boris Pasternak – ''The Second Birth''

Non-fiction

Adrian Bell – The Cherry Tree
Henri Bergson – The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
Emil Brunner – The Divine Imperative: a study in Christian ethics
F. J. Harvey Darton – The Story of English Children's Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life
Bernard DeVoto – Mark Twain's America
T. S. Eliot – Selected Essays, 1917-1932
Constantin Gane – Trecute vieți de doamne și domnițe
J. B. S. Haldane – The Causes of Evolution
Annabel Jackson – A Victorian Childhood
Kepelino – Kepelino's Traditions of Hawaii
Hugh Kingsmill – Frank Harris
F. R. Leavis – New Bearings in English Poetry
Q. D. Leavis – Fiction and the Reading Public
Beverley Nichols – Down the Garden Path
Walter B. Pitkin – Life Begins at Forty
Stith Thompson – Motif-Index of Folk-Literature
E. C. Titchmarsh – The Theory of Functions
Florence White – Good Things in England
S. Fowler Wright – ''The Life of Sir Walter Scott''

Births

January 2 – Jean Little, Canadian children's fiction author
January 5 – Umberto Eco, Italian novelist and semiotician
January 18 – Robert Anton Wilson, American novelist and playwright
January 19 – George MacBeth, Scottish poet and novelist
February 7 – Gay Talese, American literary journalist
February 9 – Roderick Cook, English actor and playwright
February 15 – Troy Kennedy Martin, Scottish scriptwriter
February 16 – Aharon Appelfeld, Israeli novelist and poet
February 20 – Adrian Cristobal, Filipino journalist, playwright and author
March 4 – Ryszard Kapuściński, Polish journalist poet and travel writer
March 18 – John Updike, American novelist and poet
March 31 – John Jakes, American historical novelist
April 5
* Bora Ćosić, Yugoslav-born Croatian-German writer
* Fănuș Neagu, Romanian novelist, journalist, and short story writer
April 8 – Joan Lingard, Scottish novelist
April 10 – Adrian Henri, English poet
April 13 – Barney Simon, South African writer, playwright and director
May 7 – Jenny Joseph, English poet
May 24 – Arnold Wesker, English dramatist
June 5 – Christy Brown, Irish autobiographer and poet
June 6 – Sara Banerji, English author and sculptor
June 11 – Athol Fugard, South African playwright and novelist
June 18 – Geoffrey Hill, English poet
July 17 – Karla Kuskin, American children's writer and illustrator
July 18 – Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Russian poet and writer
July 22 – Tom Robbins, American novelist
August 16 – Christopher Okigbo, Nigerian poet
August 17 – V. S. Naipaul, Trinidad-born novelist
August 27 – Antonia Fraser, English biographer, novelist and historian
September 7 – Malcolm Bradbury, English novelist
September 9 – Alice Thomas Ellis, English novelist, essayist and cookery book author
October 24 – Adrian Mitchell, English poet, playwright and fiction writer
October 27 – Sylvia Plath, American poet
October 31 – Katherine Paterson, Chinese-American author
December 5 – Jacques Roubaud, French poet, writer, and mathematician

Deaths

January 6 – Iacob Negruzzi, Romanian poet, columnist and memoirist
January 12 – Ella Hepworth Dixon, English writer, novelist and editor
January 21 – Lytton Strachey, English biographer
January 28 – F. M. Mayor, English novelist
February 4 – Mona Caird, English novelist, essayist and feminist
February 10 – Edgar Wallace, English crime writer
February 15 – Minnie Maddern Fiske, American actress and playwright
March 16 – Harold Monro, British poet and poetry bookshop proprietor
April 20 – Giuseppe Peano, Italian mathematician and philosopher
April 22 – Ferenc Oslay, Hungarian-Slovene historian, writer and irredenta
April 23
*Evelyn Everett-Green, English novelist and children's writer
*Laura Kieler, Norwegian novelist and dramatic inspiration
April 27 – Hart Crane, American poet
May 22 – Augusta, Lady Gregory, Irish dramatist
June 17 – Sir John Quick, Australian politician and author
July 6 – Kenneth Grahame, Scottish-born children's and short-story writer
July 20 – René Bazin, French novelist
July 22 – J. Meade Falkner, English novelist and poet
July 23 – Emma Pow Bauder, American novelist, evangelist, missionary, and reformer
August 29 – Raymond Knister, Canadian writer
August 30 – Emma Wolf, American novelist
September 5 – Paul Bern, German-American screenwriter
September 24 – Rose Combe, French writer and railway worker
October 5 – Christopher Brennan, Australian poet
October 14 – Ahmed Shawqi, Egyptian poet
November 11 – Georgina Fraser Newhall, Canadian author
November 13 – Catherine Isabella Dodd, English education writer and novelist
November 15 – Charles W. Chesnutt, American writer
November 23 – Henry S. Whitehead, American genre novelist
date unknown — Hester M. Poole, American writer, poet, art critic

Awards

James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: Helen de Guerry Simpson, Boomerang
James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: Stephen Gwynn, The Life of Mary Kingsley
Newbery Medal for children's literature: Laura Adams Armer, Waterless Mountain
Nobel Prize in Literature: John Galsworthy
Prix Goncourt: Guy Mazeline, Les Loups
Pulitzer Prize for Drama: George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, Ira Gershwin, Of Thee I Sing
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: George Dillon, The Flowering Stone
Pulitzer Prize for the Novel: Pearl S. Buck, ''The Good Earth''

1932 in literature

Events

New books

Fiction

Children and young people

Drama

Poetry

Non-fiction

Births

Deaths

Awards