1940 in literature

This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1940.

Events

January – The English literary magazine Horizon first appears in London, with Cyril Connolly, Peter Watson and Stephen Spender contributing.
February – The Canadian writer Robertson Davies leaves the Old Vic repertory company in the U.K.
March 11 – Ed Ricketts, John Steinbeck and six others leave Monterey for the Gulf of California on a marine invertebrate collecting expedition.
April – Máirtín Ó Cadhain is interned by the Irish government at Curragh Camp, as a member of the Irish Republican Army.
May 14 – The Battle of the Netherlands ends with the surrender of the main Dutch forces to Nazi German invaders. This evening, the gay Dutch Jewish writer Jacob Hiegentlich takes poison, dying four days later aged 33.
June 5 – The English novelist J. B. Priestley broadcasts his first Sunday evening radio Postscript, "An excursion to hell", on the BBC Home Service in the U.K., marking the role of pleasure steamers in the Dunkirk evacuation, which ended the day before.
July
*Jean-Paul Sartre is taken prisoner by the Germans. Léopold Sédar Senghor also becomes a prisoner of war this year. P. G. Wodehouse is interned by the Germans as an enemy alien.
*American science fiction and fantasy pulp magazine Fantastic Novels begins its first run.
July 26 – A movie adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice is released, with Aldous Huxley as a screenwriter.
September – In Uriage-les-Bains, Vichy France, Emmanuel Mounier and the Esprit circle establish a school of government and philosophy attuned to Catholic social teaching. Initially endorsing the Révolution nationale, Uriage is put off by Vichy's collaboration with Germany, and blends into the Christian left.
September 10 – Virginia Woolf's London house at 37 Mecklenburgh Square is destroyed by bombing. On October 18 she sees the ruins of her previous home, 52 Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury, similarly destroyed.
October
*Graham Greene's London house on Clapham Common Northside is destroyed by bombing, an event reflected in his novels The Ministry of Fear and The End of the Affair.
*Philip Larkin enters St John's College, Oxford.
October 4 – Brian O'Nolan's first "Cruiskeen Lawn" humorous column is published in The Irish Times. In the second column he assumes the pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen. The original columns are composed in Irish. He continues the column until the year of his death in 1966.
December – Penguin Books launches its Puffin Books children's imprint in the United Kingdom with War on Land by James Holland.
December 21 – F. Scott Fitzgerald dies of a heart attack aged 44 in the apartment of Hollywood gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, leaving his novel The Last Tycoon unfinished. The following day, his friend and fellow novelist and screenwriter, Nathanael West, is killed aged 37 in an automobile accident in California.
December 29 – Heavy bombing causes a Second Great Fire of London, destroying the premises of Simpkin, Marshall, the U.K.'s largest book wholesaler, and of many publishers also in the Paternoster Row area, including Longman, together with some 25,000 volumes in the Guildhall Library's stores and a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in a jewelled binding by Sangorski & Sutcliffe. On dawn patrol as a fighter pilot, Douglas Blackwood sees his family's publishing business, William Blackwood, burning.
December 31 – Echternacher Anzeiger, a Luxembourg newspaper, ends publication.
unknown dates
*The Russian poet Anna Akhmatova's collection From Six Books appears in the Soviet Union, but distribution is soon suspended, copies pulped and remaining issues prohibited.
*Wills & Hepworth of Loughborough begins publishing Ladybird Books in the United Kingdom in a new format, with Bunnykin's Picnic Party: a story in verse for children with illustrations in colour.

New books

Non-fiction

Mortimer J. Adler – How to Read a Book
"Cato" – Guilty Men
George Gamow – The Birth and Death of the Sun
G. H. Hardy – A Mathematician's Apology
Bernard Leach – A Potter's Book
C. S. Lewis – The Problem of Pain
Karl Mannheim – Man and Society in the Age of Reconstruction
Arthur Marder – The Anatomy of British Sea Power: a history of British naval policy in the pre-Dreadnought era, 1880–1905
A. A. Milne – War with Honour
Malcolm Muggeridge – The Thirties
Hugh Trevor-Roper – Archbishop Laud, 1573–1645
Edmund Wilson – ''To the Finland Station''

Births

January 4 – Gao Xingjian, Chinese novelist
January 13 – Edmund White, American writer
January 15 – Ted Lewis, English novelist
January 23 – Mario Levrero, Uruguayan novelist
February 6 – Tom Brokaw, American television journalist and author
February 8 – Ted Koppel, American journalist
February 9
* J. M. Coetzee, South African novelist
* Seamus Deane, Irish poet and novelist
March 16 – Bernardo Bertolucci, Italian writer and film director
March 28 – Russell Banks, American novelist and poet
April 6 - Homero Aridjis, Mexican poet, novelist and environmentalist
April 13 – J. M. G. Le Clézio, French novelist
April 15 – Jeffrey Archer, English novelist, politician and perjurer
April 24 – Sue Grafton, American detective novelist
April 30 – Jeroen Brouwers, Dutch writer
May 1 – Bobbie Ann Mason, American novelist, short story writer, essayist and literary critic
May 7 – Angela Carter, English novelist
May 8 – Peter Benchley, American novelist
May 13 – Bruce Chatwin, English novelist and travel writer
May 24 – Joseph Brodsky, Russian-born American poet and essayist
May 28 – Maeve Binchy, Irish novelist
July 17 – Tim Brooke-Taylor, English comedy writer and performer
July 31 – Fleur Jaeggy, Swiss-Italian fiction writer
September 1 – Annie Ernaux, French author and Nobel laureate
September 3 – Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan journalist, writer and novelist
September 14 – Ventseslav Konstantinov, Bulgarian writer and translator
October 11 – David McFadden, Canadian poet, fiction and travel writer
October 15 – Fanny Howe, American poet, novelist and short story writer
October 20 – Robert Pinsky, American poet
November 15 – René Avilés Fabila, Mexican writer
November 20 – Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, American Indologist and translator
December 5 – Peter Pohl, Swedish novelist
December 29 – Brigitte Kronauer, German novelist
Stan Grant, Wiradjuri Australian writer

Deaths

January 1 – Panuganti Lakshminarasimha Rao, Indian writer
January 5 – Humbert Wolfe, British poet and epigrammist
January 27 – Isaak Babel, Russian journalist and dramatist
February 11 – John Buchan, Scottish novelist
February 29
*E. F. Benson, English novelist, biographer, memoirist and short-story writer
*Emma Shaw Colcleugh, American author
March 7 – Edwin Markham, American poet
March 10 – Mikhail Bulgakov, Russian novelist and playwright
March 11 – John Monk Saunders, American writer
March 12 – Florence White, English food writer
March 16
*Sir Thomas Little Heath, English classicist and translator
*Selma Lagerlöf, Swedish children's writer and Nobel laureate
April 13 – Mary Bathurst Deane, English novelist
June 1 – Jan F. E. Celliers, South African Afrikaans-language poet, essayist, dramatist and critic
June 10 – Marcus Garvey, Jamaican journalist and publisher
June 20 – Charley Chase, American screenwriter
June 21 – Hendrik Marsman, Dutch poet
August 4 – Ze'ev Jabotinsky, Russian-born Zionist leader, novelist and poet
August 7 – T. O'Conor Sloane, American editor
September 8 – Constantin Banu, Romanian politician, journalist, cultural promoter and aphorist
September 26 – W. H. Davies, Welsh poet
November 27 – Nicolae Iorga, Romanian historian, politician, culture critic, poet and playwright
December 21 – F. Scott Fitzgerald, American novelist
December 22 – Nathanael West, American screenwriter and satirist

Awards

Carnegie Medal for children's literature: Kitty Barne, Visitors from London
James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: Charles Morgan, The Voyage
James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: Hilda F. M. Prescott, Spanish Tudor: Mary I of England
Newbery Medal for children's literature: James Daugherty, Daniel Boone
Nobel Prize in Literature: not awarded
Prix Goncourt: Francis Ambrière, Les grandes vacances
Pulitzer Prize for Drama: William Saroyan, The Time of Your Life
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Mark Van Doren, Collected Poems
Pulitzer Prize for the Novel: John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
King's Gold Medal for Poetry: Michael Thwaites

1940 in literature

Events

New books

Fiction

Children and young people

Drama

Non-fiction

Births

Deaths

Awards