1947 in literature
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1947.
Events
- January – The English actor-manager Geoffrey Kendal arrives in British India with his touring repertory theatre company "Shakespeareana." It will perform Shakespeare in towns and villages there for several decades.
- January 29 – Arthur Miller's play All My Sons opens at the Coronet Theater in New York, directed by Elia Kazan and starring Ed Begley, as the writer's first Broadway success.
- February 17 – On the death of Montserrat-born British fantasy fiction writer M. P. Shiel aged 81 in Chichester, his supposed title to the Kingdom of Redonda passes to the London poet John Gawsworth.
- March – Landfall, a literary magazine, is founded by Charles Brasch and first published by Caxton Press (New Zealand). It will become the country's longest-established literary journal.
- April
- *The opening night of the Swiss dramatist Friedrich Dürrenmatt's first play, Es steht geschrieben, is held in the Schauspielhaus Zürich, provoking fights among the audience.
- *The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Qumran Caves becomes public.
- April 6 – The 1st Tony Awards for excellence in live American theater are awarded at the Waldorf Astoria New York.
- April 24 – American novelist Willa Cather dies aged 73 of a cerebral hemorrhage in her home at 570 Park Avenue in Manhattan. On her death, her long-time domestic partner, magazine editor Edith Lewis, destroys the uncompleted manuscript of Cather's historical novel Hard Punishments according to the author's instructions.
- May – Dorothy Parker divorces Alan Campbell for the first time.
- May/June – The English novelist T. H. White buys a house in Saint Anne, Alderney in the Channel Islands, where he will spend the rest of his life.
- June – Publication begins of Vice Versa magazine in Los Angeles, the first known periodical for lesbians, edited by 'Lisa Ben'.
- June 24 – Kenneth Arnold claims to have seen nine flying saucers near Mount Rainier, Washington, starting a wave of enthusiasm in science fiction writers and scientists.
- June 25 – Most of The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank is first published as Het Achterhuis: Dagboekbrieven 14 juni 1942 – 1 augustus 1944 in Amsterdam, two years after its writer's death in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
- July
- *Jack Kerouac begins the journey he will later chronicle in his book On the Road.
- *Pramoedya Ananta Toer begins two years' imprisonment by the Dutch authorities in Jakarta for supporting the Indonesian National Revolution. While in prison he begins his first major novel, Perburuan.
- August 24 – The first Edinburgh Festival of the Arts opens in Scotland.
- September – The German literary association Group 47 forms.
- September 12 – The American novelist John Dos Passos is involved in an automobile accident that kills his wife and costs him the sight in one eye.
- November – Muriel Spark becomes editor of Poetry Review in London from this month's issue.
- November 24 – Dalton Trumbo refuses to testify before the McCarthyite House Un-American Activities Committee. Ring Lardner, Jr. attends, but refuses to answer questions. The United States House of Representatives votes 346–17 to approve citations of Contempt of Congress against all the "Hollywood Ten" screenwriters and directors who refuse to cooperate with the Committee over allegations of communist influences in the movie business. The ten are blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studios the following day.
- December 23 – Tennessee Williams' play A Streetcar Named Desire opens at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway in New York City, directed by Elia Kazan. It stars Jessica Tandy and Marlon Brando in his first major stage rôle.
- Uncertain dates
- *Woody Guthrie completes his novel House of Earth. It will not be published until 2013.
- *Séamus Ó Néill's novel Tonn Tuile is the first book from the Irish language publisher Sáirséal agus Dill in Dublin.
New books
Fiction
- Nelson Algren – The Neon Wilderness
- Thomas Armstrong – King Cotton
- Cynthia Asquith – This Mortal Coil
- Carolyn Sherwin Bailey – Miss Hickory
- Nigel Balchin – Lord, I Was Afraid
- H.E. Bates – The Purple Plain
- Marjorie Bowen – For Her to See
- Dorothy Bowers – The Bells at Old Bailey
- François Boyer – Les Jeux inconnus
- Ray Bradbury – Dark Carnival
- John Bude – Death Makes a Prophet
- John Horne Burns – The Gallery
- Italo Calvino – The Path to the Nest of Spiders
- Victor Canning – The Chasm
- Albert Camus – The Plague
- John Dickson Carr
- *The Sleeping Sphinx
- *Dr. Fell, Detective, and Other Stories
- Peter Cheyney
- * Dance Without Music
- * Dark Interlude
- Agatha Christie – The Labours of Hercules
- J.J. Connington – Common Sense Is All You Need
- Alec Coppel – A Man About a Dog
- Thomas B. Costain – The Moneyman
- Edmund Crispin – Swan Song
- Johan Daisne – The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short
- Marcia Davenport – East Side, West Side
- Cecil Day-Lewis – Minute for Murder
- Hans Fallada – Every Man Dies Alone
- Jean Genet – Querelle de Brest
- Anthony Gilbert – Death in the Wrong Room
- Jean Giono – Un Roi sans divertissement
- Winston Graham – Take My Life
- L. P. Hartley – Eustace and Hilda
- Robert A. Heinlein – Rocket Ship Galileo
- James Hilton – Nothing So Strange
- Anne Hocking – Prussian Blue
- Dorothy B. Hughes – In a Lonely Place
- Hammond Innes
- *Killer Mine
- *The Lonely Skier
- Michael Innes – A Night of Errors
- Carl Jacobi – Revelations in Black
- Yasunari Kawabata – Snow Country
- Hans Keilson – Komödie in Moll
- Arthur La Bern – Night Darkens the Streets
- Jacques Laurent – Darling Caroline
- Fritz Leiber, Jr. – Night's Black Agents
- Alexander Lernet-Holenia – Twentieth of July
- E. C. R. Lorac – Relative to Poison
- Malcolm Lowry – Under the Volcano
- Edgar Lustgarten – A Case to Answer
- Thomas Mann – Doctor Faustus
- Gabriel García Márquez – Eyes of a Blue Dog
- Ngaio Marsh – Final Curtain
- W. Somerset Maugham – Creatures of Circumstance
- Oscar Micheaux – Masquerade, a Historical Novel
- James A. Michener – Tales of the South Pacific
- Gladys Mitchell – Death and the Maiden
- W. O. Mitchell – Who Has Seen the Wind?
- Alberto Moravia – The Woman of Rome
- Willard Motley – Knock On Any Door
- Vladimir Nabokov – Bend Sinister
- Mollie Panter-Downes – One Fine Day
- Cesare Pavese – Il compagno
- Gerard Reve – De Avonden
- Kenneth Roberts – Lydia Bailey
- Michael Sadleir – Forlorn Sunset
- Samuel Shellabarger – Prince of Foxes
- Mickey Spillane – I, the Jury
- John Steinbeck
- *The Pearl
- *The Wayward Bus
- Rex Stout – Too Many Women
- Cecil Street
- * Death of an Author
- * Nothing But the Truth
- Julian Symons – A Man Called Jones
- Phoebe Atwood Taylor – The Iron Clew
- Philip Toynbee – Tea with Mrs Goodman
- Boris Vian
- *Autumn in Peking
- *Froth on the Daydream
- * – The Dead All Have the Same Skin
- Evelyn Waugh – Scott-King's Modern Europe
- Jack Williamson – With Folded Hands
- Frank Yerby – ''The Vixens''
Children and young people
- Dora Birtles – Pioneer Shack
- William Pène du Bois – The Twenty-One Balloons
- Margaret Wise Brown – Goodnight Moon
- Edgar Rice Burroughs – Tarzan and the Foreign Legion
- Nan Chauncy – They Found a Cave
- Rumer Godden – The Doll's House
- Clare Hoskyns-Abrahall – Prelude
- James Lennox Kerr – Dauntless Finds Her Crew
- Betty MacDonald – Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle
- Walter de la Mare – Collected Stories for Children
- Laurence Meynell – The Old Gang
- Arthur Ransome – Great Northern?
- Frank Richards – Billy Bunter of Greyfriars School
- Charles Green Shaw – ''It Looked Like Spilt Milk''
Drama
- Jean Anouilh – Invitation to the Castle
- Pralhad Keshav Atre – Moruchi Mavshi
- Ugo Betti – Ispezione
- Wolfgang Borchert – The Man Outside
- Maurice Clavel – Les Incendiaires
- William Douglas-Home
- * The Chiltern Hundreds
- * Now Barabbas
- Jean Genet – The Maids
- Patrick Hastings – The Blind Goddess
- Ian Hay
- * Hattie Stowe
- * Off the Record
- Michael Clayton Hutton – Power Without Glory
- Geoffrey Kerr – The Man in the Street
- Noel Langley and Robert Morley – Edward, My Son
- Arthur Miller – All My Sons
- Ena Lamont Stewart – Men Should Weep
- Ben Travers – Outrageous Fortune
- John Van Druten – The Druid Circle
- A.R. Whatmore – She Wanted a Cream Front Door
- Tennessee Williams – A Streetcar Named Desire
Poetry
- Kingsley Amis – Bright November
- Cairo poets, edited by Keith Bullen and John Cromer – Salamander: A Miscellany of Poetry
- Aimé Césaire – Cahier d'un retour au pays natal
- August Derleth – Dark of the Moon: Poems of Fantasy and the Macabre
- Abba Kovner – Ad Lo-Or
- Philip Larkin – A Girl in Winter
- Louis MacNeice – The Dark Tower
- Shinoe Shōda – ''Sange''
Non-fiction
- Simone de Beauvoir – The Ethics of Ambiguity
- Cleanth Brooks – The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry
- L. Sprague de Camp – The Evolution of Naval Weapons
- Bernard DeVoto – Across the Wide Missouri
- Benjamin Fondane – Baudelaire et l'expérience du gouffre
- Anne Frank – The Diary of a Young Girl
- George Gamow – One Two Three... Infinity
- Jacquetta Hawkes and Christopher Hawkes – Prehistoric Britain
- Primo Levi – If This Is a Man
- Walter Lippmann – The Cold War
- George Orwell – Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool
- Nicolae Petrescu-Comnen – Preludi del grande dramma
- Samuel Putnam – Paris Was Our Mistress: Memoirs of a Lost & Found Generation
- Franz Rosenthal – The Technique and Approach of Muslim Scholarship
- Hugh Trevor-Roper – The Last Days of Hitler
- A. L. Zissu – ''Nu există cult mozaic ''
Births
- January 14 – Richard Laymon, American suspense novelist
- February 3 – Paul Auster, American novelist
- February 9 – Eamon Duffy, Irish church historian and academic
- March 22 – James Patterson, American novelist and short story writer
- April 3 – Srikrishna Alanahalli, Indian novelist and poet
- April 12 – Tom Clancy, American novelist
- April 18 – Kathy Acker, American novelist and poet
- April 27 – Astrid Roemer, Suriname-born Dutch novelist, poet and playwright
- April 28 – Humayun Azad, Bangladeshi author, poet, scholar and linguist
- May 10 – Thomas Tessier, American writer of horror novels and short stories
- May 12 – Catherine Yronwode, American author and illustrator
- May 27 – Felix Dennis, English publisher and poet
- June 5 – David Hare, English playwright
- June 19 – Salman Rushdie, Indian novelist writing in English
- June 22 – Octavia E. Butler, American science fiction writer
- July 2 – Jürg Amann, Swiss dramatist
- July 18 – Dermot Healy, Irish novelist and poet
- July 23 – Gardner Dozois, American science fiction author and editor
- August 14 - Danielle Steel, American romance novelist
- August 23 – Willy Russell, English dramatist
- September 8 – Marianne Wiggins, American novelist
- September 21 – Stephen King, American novelist
- October 14 – Tomás de Mattos, Uruguayan writer and librarian
- October 19 – Giorgio Cavazzano, Italian comics artist and illustrator
- October 26 – Trevor Joyce, Irish poet
- November 6 – Michelle Magorian, English children's author
- November 14 – P. J. O'Rourke, American political satirist and journalist
- November 28 – Gustav Hasford, American marine, novelist, journalist, poet and book thief
- December 4 – Ursula Krechel, German writer and poet
- December 26 – Jean Echenoz, French novelist
- unknown dates
- *Michael Burkard, American poet and educator
- *Jaume Cabré, Catalan Spanish novelist and screenwriter
- *Shahid Nadeem, Pakistani playwright
- *Borka Pavićević, Montenegrin dramatist and columnist
Deaths
- January 19 – Manuel Machado, Spanish poet
- February 1 – J. D. Beresford, English short-story writer
- February 4 – Margaret Cameron, American novelist, humorist, playwright, non-fiction writer
- February 5 – Hans Fallada, German novelist
- February 11 – E. M. Hull, English romance novelist
- February 15 – Margaret Marshall Saunders, Canadian author
- March 12 – Winston Churchill, American novelist
- March 13 – Angela Brazil, English school-story writer for girls
- April 24 – Willa Cather, American novelist
- April 30 – Anna Wickham, English poet
- May 21
- *Flora Thompson, English semi-autobiographical novelist
- *E. C. Vivian, English genre novelist
- June 6 – James Agate, English author and critic
- June 17 – Maxwell Perkins, American literary editor
- August 5 – Herbert Asquith, English poet and novelist
- August 30 – Jessie Wilson Manning, American author and lecturer
- September 25 – Afevork Ghevre Jesus, Ethiopian author writing in Amharic
- September 26 – Hugh Lofting, English-born children's writer
- September 15 – Richard Le Gallienne, English writer and poet
- October 13
- *William Le Queux, English-born French novelist and writer
- *Sidney Webb, English political economist
- November 12 – Baroness Orczy, Hungarian novelist writing in English
- November 14 – Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes, Anglo-French novelist and biographer writing in English
- November 20 – Wolfgang Borchert, German author and playwright
- December 7 – Tristan Bernard, French playwright and novelist
- December 15 – Arthur Machen, Welsh journalist, novelist and short-story writer
- December 30 – Alfred North Whitehead, English mathematician and philosopher
Awards
- Carnegie Medal for children's literature: Walter de la Mare, Collected Stories for Children
- Frost Medal: Gustav Davidson
- James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: L. P. Hartley, Eustace and Hilda
- James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: Rev. C. C. E. Raven, English Naturalists from Neckham to Ray
- Knight Bachelor: Ralph Richardson
- Newbery Medal for children's literature: Carolyn Sherwin Bailey, Miss Hickory
- Nobel Prize in Literature: André Gide
- Premio Nadal: Miguel Delibes, La sombra del ciprés es alargada
- Pulitzer Prize for Drama: no award given
- Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Robert Lowell: Lord Weary's Castle
- Pulitzer Prize for the Novel: Robert Penn Warren – ''All the King's Men''