1941 in literature

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This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1941.

January 3 – A decree (Normalschrifterlaß) issued in Nazi Germany by Martin Bormann on behalf of Adolf Hitler calls for replacement of blackletter typefaces by Antiqua.^[1]
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;^[2] meanwhile, his colleague Ion Vinea protects a Jewish friend, the novelist Sergiu Dan.^[3] The destruction of Jewish life and property is documented from inside the Jewish community by the photojournalist F. Brunea-Fox,^[4] 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.^[5]
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.^[6]
- Eugene O'Neill completes Long Day's Journey into Night (published and premiered in 1956).
- 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 (died 1940) to celebrate British identity.^[7]
April 6 – The National Library of Serbia is destroyed by bombing.
April 19 – Bertolt Brecht's anti-war play Mother Courage and Her Children (Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder) is launched at the Schauspielhaus Zürich in Switzerland, with Therese Giehse in the title rôle.^[8]
May 5 – Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin meet while both reading English at St John's College, Oxford.^[9]
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.^[10]
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.^[11] The original cast stars Kay Hammond as Elvira, Margaret Rutherford as Madame Arcati, Cecil Parker as Charles and Fay Compton as Ruth.^[12] 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.^[13]
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.^[14]
- 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 (1944), for long the only work to deal with the events.^[15]
August 6 – C. S. Lewis begins a series of BBC Radio broadcasts that give rise to Mere Christianity.^[16]
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.^[17]
September – In Nazi-allied Romania, George Călinescu publishes his companion to Romanian literature (Istoria literaturii române de la origini până în prezent). It is condemned in the far-right press for including entries on Romanian Jewish writers, whose work has been explicitly banned.^[18] It is eventually withdrawn from circulation, but its own racist undertones are criticized by intellectuals such as the Jewish (Felix Aderca and Mihail Sebastian) and the Romanian (Șerban Cioculescu, Mihai Ralea and Vladimir Streinu).^[19]
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.^[20]
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.^[21]
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 (arrested this summer for treason and imprisoned in the psychiatric ward at Leningrad Prison No. 1, where he will die in 1942), 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.^[22] 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.^[23]
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.^[24]
- Biblioteca Cantonale (Cantonal Library) 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.^[25]
- 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.^[26]
- The Classic Comics series is launched in the United States with a version of The Three Musketeers.

New books

Poetry

W. H. Auden – New Year Letter (British edition of 'The Double Man')
William Rose Benét – The Dust which is God
Laurence Binyon – The North Star and Other Poems
T. S. Eliot – The Dry Salvages (third of the Four Quartets; in February New English Weekly)
A Choice of Kipling's Verse by T. S. Eliot (published December)
G. S. Fraser – The Fatal Landscape and Other Poems
Patrick Kavanagh – The Great Hunger^[31]
John Gillespie Magee, Jr. – "High Flight"
John Pudney – "For Johnny"

Non-fiction

Frank Buck with Ferrin Fraser – All in a Lifetime
George Călinescu – Istoria literaturii române de la origini până în prezent
Joyce Cary
- The Case for African Freedom
- A House of Children
Leonora Eyles – For My Enemy Daughter^[32]
Victor Gollancz – Russia and Ourselves
Louis MacNeice – The Poetry of W. B. Yeats
The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
Michael Richey – "Sunk by a Mine. A Survivor's Story"
Vita Sackville-West – English Country Houses
Antal Szerb – A világirodalom története (History of World Literature)
Robert Vansittart – Black Record. Germans Past and Present
Rebecca West – Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: a journey through Yugoslavia
Stefan Zweig – Brasilien. Ein Land der Zukunft (Brazil, Land of the Future)

Births

January 19 – Colin Gunton, English theologian and academic (died 2003)
January 24 – Gary K. Wolf, American humorist
March 13
- Mahmoud Darwish, Palestinian poet (died 2008)
- Donella Meadows, American environmentalist (died 2001)
March 22 – Billy Collins, American poet
April 10 – Paul Theroux, American novelist and travel writer
May 13 – Miles Kington, Northern Irish-born humorist and journalist (died 2008)
May 19 – Nora Ephron, American novelist and screenwriter (died 2012)^[33]
May 24 – Bob Dylan, born Robert Allen Zimmerman, American singer-songwriter, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature
June 5 – Spalding Gray, American screenwriter and dramatist (died 2004)^[34]
June 27 – James P. Hogan, English-born American science fiction author (died 2010)
July 5 – Barbara Frischmuth, Austrian writer of poetry and prose (died 2025)
July 9 – Cirilo Bautista, Filipino poet, author and critic (died 2018)^[35]
July 12 – John Lahr, American-born author and critic
August 9
- Shirlee Busbee, American novelist
- Jamila Gavin, Anglo-Indian children's writer
August 26 – Ayşe Kulin, Turkish writer
September 1 – Gwendolyn MacEwen, Canadian poet (died 1987)
September 3 – Sergei Dovlatov, Russian short-story writer and novelist (died 1990)
September 15 – Lindsay Barrett, Jamaican novelist, poet and journalist
October 2 – John Sinclair, American poet
October 4 – Anne Rice, American horror/fantasy writer (died 2021)
October 10 – Ken Saro-Wiwa, Nigerian writer (executed 1995)
October 13 – John Snow, English cricketer and poet
October 20 – Stewart Parker, Northern Irish poet and playwright (died 1988)
October 25 – Anne Tyler, American novelist
October 27 – Gerd Brantenberg, Norwegian novelist, author and feminist
November 18 – Marta Pessarrodona, Spanish poet, literary critic, essayist, biographer
November 23 – Derek Mahon, Irish poet (died 2020)
December 5 – Sheridan Morley, English biographer and critic (died 2007)
unknown dates
- Jonathan Aaron, American poet^[36]
- John Mole, English poet and musician^[37]
- Pepetela, Angolan novelist^[38]
- Jay Rubin, American scholar and translator^[39]

1941 in literature

New books

Fiction

Children and young people

Drama

Poetry

Non-fiction

Births

Deaths

Awards

References

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