1941 in literature

Events

• January 3 – A decree issued in Nazi Germany by Martin Bormann on behalf of Adolf Hitler calls for replacement of blackletter typefaces by Antiqua.
• January 20 – Chittadhar Hridaya begins a six-year sentence of imprisonment in Kathmandu for writing poetry in Nepal Bhasa, during which time he secretly composes his Buddhist epic Sugata Saurabha in that language.
• January 21–23 – A failed "Legionary Rebellion" in Bucharest, opposing loyalists of the Ion Antonescu government to the radically fascist Iron Guard, doubles as a pogrom against Romanian Jews. Avant-garde poet Ion Barbu joins a rebel squad storming into the Ministry of Education; meanwhile, his colleague Ion Vinea protects a Jewish friend, the novelist Sergiu Dan. The destruction of Jewish life and property is documented from inside the Jewish community by the photojournalist F. Brunea-Fox, and by Marcel Janco. Janco's brother-in-law, essayist Jacques G. Costin, survives, but his brother is tortured and killed by the Guard; the murder prompts Janco to leave for British Palestine in February.
• Spring – The Antioch Review is founded as a literary magazine at Antioch College in Ohio.
• March
• *Jean-Paul Sartre is released from prisoner-of-war camp on health grounds.
• *Eugene O'Neill completes Long Day's Journey into Night.
• *Publication of Lord David Cecil's The English Poets by William Collins in London, first of the 'Britain in Pictures' series devised by Hilda Matheson to celebrate British identity.
• April 6 – The National Library of Serbia is destroyed by bombing.
• April 19 – Bertolt Brecht's anti-war play Mother Courage and Her Children is launched at the Schauspielhaus Zürich in Switzerland, with Therese Giehse in the title rôle.
• May 5 – Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin meet while both reading English at St John's College, Oxford.
• May 10/11 – The Blitz: 250,000 books are burned in the Library stacks of the British Museum in London as a result of incendiary bombing.
• May 21 – The 1941 theatre strike in Norway begins. Actors in the Norwegian professional theater strike in response to the revocation of work permits for six actors who refuse to perform on state radio for the Quisling regime during the occupation of Norway by Nazi Germany.
• June – Noël Coward's comedy Blithe Spirit is premièred at Manchester Opera House in England. Opening in London on July 2, its run of 1,997 consecutive performances sets a record for non-musical plays in the West End theatre, which will not be surpassed for more than twenty years. The original cast stars Kay Hammond as Elvira, Margaret Rutherford as Madame Arcati, Cecil Parker as Charles and Fay Compton as Ruth. The Broadway première takes place on November 5 at the Morosco Theatre.
• June 22 – Among those fleeing the Operation Barbarossa attack on the Soviet Union is a Moldovan Jewish poet, Alexandru Robot, declared missing, presumed dead by August.
• June 29
• *For unknown reasons, the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács is arrested by the NKVD and held at Lubyanka Building in Moscow; he will be released on August 26, possibly after a plea made by Mátyás Rákosi.
• *The Iași pogrom in Nazi-allied Romania is witnessed by the Italian war correspondent Curzio Malaparte, who recounts it in a chapter of his novel Kaputt, for long the only work to deal with the events.
• August 6 – C. S. Lewis begins a series of BBC Radio broadcasts that give rise to Mere Christianity.
• August 18 – Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee, Jr., a 19-year-old poet of American paternity serving in Britain with the Royal Canadian Air Force, makes a high-altitude test flight in a Spitfire V from RAF Llandow in Wales, and then by September 3 completes the sonnet "High Flight" about the experience. On December 11 he dies in an air collision over England.
• Fall – Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine is launched under the editorship of Frederic Dannay, by Lawrence E. Spivak's Mercury Publications in New York City.
• September – In Nazi-allied Romania, George Călinescu publishes his companion to Romanian literature. It is condemned in the far-right press for including entries on Romanian Jewish writers, whose work has been explicitly banned. It is eventually withdrawn from circulation, but its own racist undertones are criticized by intellectuals such as the Jewish and the Romanian.
• September 6–7 – Under Nazi occupation, Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever is among the Polish Jews interned in the Vilna Ghetto.
• c. October – The first known reference to Babi Yar in poetry is written soon after the Babi Yar massacres, the work of the young Jewish-Ukrainian poet from Kyiv and an eyewitness, Liudmila Titova; her poem "Babi Yar" will be discovered only in the 1990s.
• October 27 – F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Last Tycoon, unfinished on his death in 1940, is edited by Edmund Wilson and published by Charles Scribner's Sons in New York City.
• November – Brendan Behan is released from Borstal in England and deported back to Ireland.
• December
• *During the Siege of Leningrad, Yakov Druskin, ill and starving, and Maria Malich, second wife of Russian avant-garde poet Danil Kharms, trudge to Kharms' bombed-out apartment building to collect a trunk of manuscripts, so preserving his work and that of Alexander Vvedensky's for decades until it can be circulated. Vvedensky, arrested in September in Kharkiv for "counterrevolutionary agitation", is evacuated, but dies of pleurisy on the way.
• *Penguin Books publishes in the U.K. the first story book in its Puffin Books children's paperback imprint: Worzel Gummidge by Barbara Euphan Todd. The series editor is Eleanor Graham.
• unknown dates
• *The new National and University Library of Slovenia building in Ljubljana, designed by Jože Plečnik in 1930/1931, is completed and opened to the public.
• *Biblioteca Cantonale at Lugano in the Italian-speaking Canton of Ticino in neutral Switzerland, designed by Rino and Carlo Tami, is completed.
• *The Bosnian Serb writer Branko Ćopić joins the Yugoslav Partisans.
• *The poet Ezra Pound applies unsuccessfully to return to the U.S. from Italy. He begins appearing on Rome Radio with antisemitic broadcasts sympathetic to the Axis powers.
• *The Classic Comics series is launched in the United States with a version of The Three Musketeers.

New books

Fiction

• Margery Allingham – Traitor's Purse
• Isaac Asimov – Nightfall
• William Attaway – Blood on the Forge
• Pierre Benoit – The Gobi Desert
• Frans G. Bengtsson – The Long Ships, part 1
• Maurice Blanchot – Thomas l'Obscur
• Godfried Bomans – Erik of het klein insectenboek
• Jorge Luis Borges – The Garden of Forking Paths
• Phyllis Bottome – London Pride
• Caryl Brahms and S. J. Simon – No Bed for Bacon
• Christianna Brand
• * Death in High Heels
• * Heads You Lose
• John Buchan – Sick Heart River
• Pearl S. Buck – China Sky
• Gerald Butler – They Cracked Her Glass Slipper
• James M. Cain – Mildred Pierce
• Joyce Cary – Herself Surprised
• John Dickson Carr
• *The Case of the Constant Suicides
• *Death Turns the Tables
• *Seeing is Believing
• Peter Cheyney
• * It Couldn't Matter Less
• * Your Deal, My Lovely
• Agatha Christie
• *Evil Under the Sun
• *N or M?
• J. Storer Clouston – Beastmark the Spy
• Colette – Julie de Carneilhan
• J.J. Connington – The Twenty-One Clues
• John Creasey – Salute the Toff
• Freeman Wills Crofts
• * James Tarrant, Adventurer
• * The Losing Game
• A. J. Cronin – The Keys of the Kingdom
• Eric Cross – The Tailor and Ansty
• Cecil Day-Lewis – The Case of the Abominable Snowman
• L. Sprague de Camp – Lest Darkness Fall
• August Derleth – Someone in the Dark
• Ilya Ehrenburg – The Fall of Paris
• F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Last Tycoon
• Anthony Gilbert
• * The Vanishing Corpse
• * The Woman in Red
• Marcus Goodrich – Delilah
• Patrick Hamilton – Hangover Square
• Robert A. Heinlein – Methuselah's Children
• James Hilton – Random Harvest
• Anne Hocking – Miss Milverton
• Dorothy B. Hughes – The Bamboo Blonde
• Soeman Hs – Kawan Bergeloet
• Hammond Innes – Attack Alarm
• Michael Innes – Appleby on Ararat
• Anna Kavan – Change the Name
• C. S. Lewis – The Screwtape Letters
• Janet Lewis – The Wife of Martin Guerre
• E. C. R. Lorac – Case in the Clinic
• Marie Belloc Lowndes – Before the Storm
• Compton Mackenzie – The Red Tapeworm
• Hugh MacLennan – Barometer Rising
• Ngaio Marsh
• * Death and the Dancing Footman
• * Surfeit of Lampreys
• W. Somerset Maugham – Up at the Villa
• Oscar Micheaux – The Wind From Nowhere
• Betty Miller – Farewell, Leicester Square
• Henry Miller – The Colossus of Maroussi
• Gladys Mitchell
• * Hangman's Curfew
• * When Last I Died
• Edgar Mittelholzer – Corentyne Thunder
• Vilhelm Moberg – Ride This Night
• Paul Morand – The Man in a Hurry
• Vladimir Nabokov – The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
• Flann O'Brien – An Béal Bocht
• E. Phillips Oppenheim – The Shy Plutocrat
• Rafael Sabatini – Columbus
• Budd Schulberg – What Makes Sammy Run?
• Anya Seton – My Theodosia
• Georges Simenon – Strange Inheritance
• Armstrong Sperry – Call It Courage
• Cecil Street
• * Death at the Helm
• * They Watched by Night
• Phoebe Atwood Taylor
• *The Perennial Boarder
• *The Hollow Chest
• Kylie Tennant – The Battlers
• Franz Werfel – The Song of Bernadette
• Rex Warner – The Aerodrome
• Eudora Welty – A Curtain of Green
• Ethel Lina White – She Faded into Air
• Virginia Woolf – ''Between the Acts''

Children and young people

• Enid Blyton
• *The Adventurous Four
• *The Twins at St. Clare's
• Walter D. Edmonds – The Matchlock Gun
• Mary Grannan – Just Mary
• Robert McCloskey – Make Way for Ducklings
• Arthur Ransome – Missee Lee
• H. A. Rey and Margret Rey – Curious George
• Mary Treadgold – We Couldn't Leave Dinah
• Dorothy Vicary – Lucy Brown's Schooldays etc.
• Laura Ingalls Wilder – ''Little Town on the Prairie''

Drama