1945 in literature

This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1945.

Events

January – In Paris, journalist and poet Robert Brasillach is tried and found guilty of "intelligence with the enemy" during World War II, sparking a major dispute in French society over collaboration and clemency.
c. January 1 – Jean-Paul Sartre refuses the Légion d'honneur.
January 27 – Primo Levi is among those liberated from the Auschwitz concentration camp complex.
February – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is sentenced to eight years in a labour camp for criticizing Joseph Stalin.
February 13–15 – The bombing of Dresden in World War II is seen by the German Jewish diarist Victor Klemperer, the novelist Kurt Vonnegut as an American prisoner of war, and Miles Tripp as a British bomb aimer. It will feature in Józef Mackiewicz's novel Sprawa pulkownika Miasojedowa, Bohumil Hrabal's Ostře sledované vlaky and Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death.
March 4 – Poet Pablo Neruda is elected a Chilean senator and officially joins the Communist Party of Chile four months later.
March 8 – Federico García Lorca's play The House of Bernarda Alba, completed just before his assassination in 1936, is first performed, in Buenos Aires.
March 31 – Tennessee Williams' semi-autobiographical "memory play" The Glass Menagerie opens on Broadway at the Playhouse Theatre (New York City), starring Laurette Taylor and winning the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award.
About end March – Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs complete their mystery novel And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a fictionalization of manslaughter committed in 1944 by their friend Lucien Carr, but it will not appear fully until 2008.
May – The Estonian poet Heiti Talvik is deported to Siberia and never heard of again.
May 2
*The expatriate American poet Ezra Pound is arrested by the Italian resistance movement and taken to its headquarters in Chiavari, but soon released as of no interest. On May 5, he turns himself in to the United States Army. He is held in a military detention camp outside Pisa, spending 25 days in an open cage before being given a tent. There he appears to suffer a nervous breakdown. While in the camp he drafts The Pisan Cantos.
*French novelist Colette is the first woman admitted to the Académie Goncourt.
May 8 – The occupying powers in Allied-occupied Germany and Austria impose publishing curbs as part of denazification.
June – Ern Malley hoax: Australia's most celebrated literary hoax takes place when Angry Penguins is published with poems by the fictional Ern Malley. Poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart created the poems from lines of other published work and then sent them as the purported work of a recently deceased poet. The hoax is played on Max Harris, at this time a 22-year-old avant garde poet and critic who had started the modernist magazine Angry Penguins. Harris and his circle of literary friends agreed that a hitherto completely unknown modernist poet of great merit had come to light in suburban Australia. The Autumn 1944 edition of the magazine with the poems comes out in mid-1945 due to wartime printing delays with cover illustration by Sidney Nolan. An Australian newspaper uncovers the hoax within weeks. McAuley and Stewart loved early Modernist poets but despise later modernism and especially the well-funded Angry Penguins and are jealous of Harris's precocious success.
c. July – Theatre Workshop is formed in the north of England by Joan Littlewood, Ewan MacColl and other former members of Theatre Union as a touring company.
August 17 – The allegorical dystopian novella Animal Farm by George Orwell, a satire on Stalinism, is first published by Fredric Warburg in London.
September 11 – The Citizens Theatre opens in Glasgow under this name.
September – J. B. Priestley's drama An Inspector Calls is premièred in Russian translation in Leningrad.
October – The National Library of Korea is established in Seoul in the newly-liberated country, inheriting the Government-General of Chōsen Library.
October 29 – Vladimir Nabokov's 1940 application for U.S. citizenship is granted.
November 1 – The U.S. magazine Ebony appears.
November 21 – André Malraux is named Minister of Information by the new French President, Charles de Gaulle.
November 26 – The U.K. film Brief Encounter, adapted from Noël Coward's short play Still Life, is released.
November – Astrid Lindgren's children's book Pippi Långstrump, with illustrations by Ingrid Vang Nyman, is published in Sweden by Rabén & Sjögren, having won a competition run by the publisher for children's books in August. It introduces an anarchic child heroine. An English translation appears as Pippi Longstocking.
December – Nag Hammadi library, a collection of Gnostic texts, is discovered in Upper Egypt.
Canadian author Elizabeth Smart's novel in prose poetry By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept is published in London ; the writer's mother Louise leads a successful campaign with government officials to have the book banned in Canada, buying up as many copies as she can find of those that make their way into the country and having them burned.

New books

Poetry

Idris Davies – ''Tonypandy and other poems''

Non-fiction

Ion Biberi – Lumea de mâine
Vannevar Bush – As We May Think
R. G. Collingwood – The Idea of Nature
Françoise Frenkel – Rien où poser sa tête
Carlo Emilio Gadda – Eros e Priapo
Jacquetta Hawkes – Early Britain
– Six Candles for Indonesia
Aldous Huxley – The Perennial Philosophy
Arthur Koestler – The Yogi and the Commissar and Other Essays
Carlo Levi – Christ Stopped at Eboli
C. S. Lewis – The Great Divorce
Betty MacDonald – The Egg and I
Maurice Merleau-Ponty – Phenomenology of Perception
Karl Popper – The Open Society and Its Enemies
Bertrand Russell – A History of Western Philosophy And Its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day
Ernesto Sabato – One and the Universe
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. – The Age of Jackson
Henry DeWolf Smyth – Smyth Report
Seweryna Szmaglewska – Dymy nad Birkenau
Richard Wright – ''Black Boy''

Births

January 3 – David Starkey, English historian
January 20 – Robert Olen Butler, American novelist and short story writer
January 30 – Michael Dorris, American writer
February 12 – David Small, American author and illustrator
February 13 - William Sleator, American science-fiction writer
February 23 – Robert Gray, Australian poet and critic
February 25 – Shiva Naipaul, Trinidad-born novelist
March 19 – Jim Turner, American literary editor
April 2 – Anne Waldman, American poet
April 16 – Sebastian Barker, English poet and journalist
April 27 – August Wilson, American playwright
April 30 – Annie Dillard, American poet and prose writer
June 11 – Robert Munsch, American-Canadian author and academic
June 13 – Whitley Strieber, American horror novelist
June 21 – Adam Zagajewski, Polish poet, novelist and essayist
July 5 – Michael Blake, American novelist and screenwriter
July 9 – Dean Koontz, American novelist
July 12 – Remy Sylado, Indonesian writer
July 21 – Wendy Cope, English poet
July 25 - Joseph Delaney, English author
July 30 – Patrick Modiano, French novelist, Nobel laureate
September 1 – Mustafa Balel, Turkish author and translator
October 15 – John Murrell, American-born dramatist
November 5 – Richard Holmes, English literary biographer
November 24 – Nuruddin Farah, Somali novelist
December 17 – Jacqueline Wilson, English children's writer
December 21 – Raymond E. Feist, American fantasy writer
unknown dates
*Esther Croft, French Canadian novelist and short-story writer
*Rabai al-Madhoun, Palestinian writer
*Mari Strachan, Welsh novelist
*Mohamed Zafzaf, Moroccan novelist

Deaths

January 13 – Margaret Deland, American novelist
January 15
January 22 – Else Lasker-Schüler, German-born Jewish poet
January 27 – Antal Szerb, Hungarian writer
February 6 – Robert Brasillach, French writer
February 23 – Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy, Russian writer
c. March 12 – Anne Frank, German-born Dutch child diarist
March 15 – Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, French novelist
March 20 – Lord Alfred Douglas, English poet
March 31 – Maurice Donnay, French dramatist
April – Josef Čapek, Czech artist and writer
April 9 – Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German theologian
May 15 – Charles Williams, English author
May 29 – Mihail Sebastian, Romanian Jewish playwright, essayist, and novelist
June 5 – Ilie Bărbulescu, Romanian linguist and journalist
June 8 – Robert Desnos, French poet
June 11 – Lurana W. Sheldon, American author and newspaper editor
July 13 – Alla Nazimova, Crimean-born American scriptwriter and actress
July 25 – Charles Gilman Norris, American novelist
August 18 – E. R. Eddison, English fantasy writer
August 20 – Alexander Roda Roda, Austro-Croatian-born novelist
August 26 – Franz Werfel, Bohemian-born writer
September 9 – Zinaida Gippius, émigré Russian writer
September 21 – Ioan C. Filitti, Romanian historian, political theorist and essayist
September 22 – Thomas Burke, English novelist and story writer
October 8 – Felix Salten, Austrian-born children's writer
November 21 – Robert Benchley, American humorist
December 4 – Arthur Morrison, English writer
December 14 - Maurice Baring, English poet and writer
December 28 – Theodore Dreiser, American author

Awards

James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: L. A. G. Strong, Travellers
James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: D. S. MacColl, Philip Wilson Steer
Newbery Medal for children's literature: Robert Lawson, Rabbit Hill
Nobel Prize in Literature: Gabriela Mistral
Premio Nadal: José Félix Tapia, La luna ha entrado en casa
Prix Goncourt: Jean-Louis Bory, Mon village à l'heure allemande
Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Mary Chase, Harvey
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Karl Shapiro, V-Letter and Other Poems
Pulitzer Prize for the Novel: John Hersey, ''A Bell for Adano''

1945 in literature

Events

New books

Fiction

Children and young people

Drama

Poetry

Non-fiction

Births

Deaths

Awards