1941 in literature

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List of years in literature (table)
In poetry
1938
1939
1940
1941
1942
1943
1944

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

Events[]

  • 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 , 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]
  • April 6 – The National Library of Serbia is destroyed by bombing.[7]
  • April 19 – Bertolt Brecht's 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 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.[10] The original cast stars Kay Hammond as Elvira, Margaret Rutherford as Madame Arcati, Cecil Parker as Charles and Fay Compton as Ruth.[11] 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.[12]
  • 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.[13]
    • 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.[14]
  • August 6 – C. S. Lewis begins a series of BBC Radio broadcasts that give rise to Mere Christianity.[15]
  • 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.[16]
  • 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.[17] 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).[18]
  • 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.[19]
  • 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.[20]
  • November – Brendan Behan is released from Borstal in England and deported back to Ireland.
  • December
Alexander Vvedensky's mug shot in NKVD records
    • 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.[21] Vvedensky, arrested in September in Kharkov 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.[22]
  • 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.[23]
    • 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.[24]
    • 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.[25]
    • The Classic Comics series is launched in the United States with a version of The Three Musketeers.

New books[]

Fiction[]

Children and young people[]

Drama[]

Poetry[]

Main article: 1941 in 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[30]
  • John Gillespie Magee, Jr. – "High Flight"
  • John Pudney – "For Johnny"

Non-fiction[]

The publisher Robert M. McBride goes bankrupt in 1948 and the copyright on All In A Lifetime is never renewed.
  • 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[31]
  • 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)[32]
  • 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)[33]
  • June 27 – James P. Hogan, English-born American science fiction author (died 2010)
  • July 9 – Cirilo Bautista, Filipino poet, author and critic (died 2018)[34]
  • July 12 – John Lahr, American-born author and critic
  • August 9
    • Shirlee Busbee, American novelist
    • Jamila Gavin, Anglo-Indian children's 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
  • 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 23 – Derek Mahon, Irish poet (died 2020)
  • December 5 – Sheridan Morley, English biographer and critic (died 2007)
  • unknown dates
    • Jonathan Aaron, American poet[35]
    • John Mole, English poet and musician[36]
    • Pepetela, Angolan novelist[37]
    • Jay Rubin, American scholar and translator[38]

Deaths[]

  • January 4 – Henri Bergson, French philosopher (born 1859)
  • January 6
    • Franz Hessel, German writer and translator (born 1880)
    • F. R. Higgins, Irish poet and theatre director (born 1896)
  • January 13 – James Joyce, Irish novelist and poet (born 1882)
  • January 23 – William Arthur Dunkerley (John Oxenham), English journalist, novelist and poet (born 1852)
  • February 7 – Banjo Paterson, Australian bush poet (born 1864)
  • February 9 – Elizabeth von Arnim, Australian-born English novelist (born 1866)[39]
  • February 22 – G. E. Trevelyan, English novelist, died of injuries sustained in air raid (born 1903)
  • February 24 – Robert Byron, English travel writer (born 1905; torpedoed)
  • March 13 – Elizabeth Madox Roberts, American novelist and poet (born 1881)
  • March 28 – Virginia Woolf, English novelist and writer (born 1882; suicide)[40]
  • June 1 – Sir Hugh Walpole, New Zealand-born English novelist (born 1884)
  • June 15 – Evelyn Underhill, English poet, mystic and pacifist (born 1875)
  • June 27 – Ieremia Cecan, Bessarabian journalist and Christian polemicist (born 1867; shot)
  • July 4 – Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński, Polish writer, translator and gynecologist (born 1874)
  • August 7 – Rabindranath Tagore, Bengali polymath and writer (born 1861)
  • August 31 – Marina Tsvetaeva, Soviet Russian poet (born 1892; suicide)
  • September 19 – H. E. Marshall, Scottish history writer for children (born 1867)
  • October 17 – May Ziadeh, Lebanese-Palestinian poet, essayist and translator (born 1886)
  • November 8 – Gaetano Mosca, Italian political scientist and public servant (born 1909)
  • November 18 – Émile Nelligan, French Canadian poet (born 1879)[41]
  • unknown date – Anne Elliot, English novelist (born 1856)

Awards[]

References[]

  1. ^ ""The Bormann Decree" banning the use of the Fraktur typeface". About.com. Retrieved 2013-10-23.
  2. ^ (2003-04-12). "Când totul se prăbușea". Curierul Național. Bucharest.
  3. ^ Coposu, Corneliu (2014). "Corneliu Coposu despre atitudinea lui Iuliu Maniu față de evrei". Caiete Silvane (in Romanian) (112). Archived from the original on 2015-07-05.CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  4. ^ Crohmălniceanu, Ovid S. (2001). Evreii în mișcarea de avangardă românească. Bucharest: Editura Hasefer. pp. 130–132. ISBN 973-8056-52-7.
  5. ^ Sandqvist, Tom (2006). Dada East. The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London: MIT Press. pp. 379–380. ISBN 0-262-19507-0.
  6. ^ David Burke (1 March 2009). Writers in Paris: Literary Lives in the City of Light. Catapult. p. 231. ISBN 978-1-58243-958-7.
  7. ^ "The Nazis Destroy the National Library of Serbia". Jeremy Norman's HistoryofInformation.com. 2016-05-04. Retrieved 2016-05-06.
  8. ^ Therese Giehse interview with W. Stuart McDowell, 1968, in "Acting Brecht: The Munich Years," The Brecht Sourcebook, Carol Martin and Henry Bial, editors (Routledge, 2000) p. 71.
  9. ^ Bradford, Richard (2012). The Odd Couple: The curious friendship between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin. London: Robson Press. ISBN 9781849543750.
  10. ^ Day, Barry (2005). Coward on Film: The Cinema of Noël Coward. Scarecrow Press. p. 83. ISBN 0-8108-5358-2.
  11. ^ "Piccadilly Theatre: Blithe Spirit by Noel Coward". The Times (48968). London. 1941-07-03. p. 2.
  12. ^ Colesnic, Iurie (2006). "Alexandru Robot – poetul enigmelor (90 de ani de la naștere)" (PDF). Magazin Bibliologic (in Romanian) (1): 73. Archived from the original on 2012-02-27.CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  13. ^ Stykalin, A. S.; Sereda, V. T. (2001). "1941. György Lukács la Lubianka". Magazin Istoric (12): 48–52.
  14. ^ Gheorghiu, Mihai-Dinu (2011). "The Iași Pogrom in Curzio Malaparte's Kaputt: Between History and Fiction". In Glăjar, Valentina; Teodorescu, Jeanine (eds.). Local History, Transnational Memory in the Romanian Holocaust. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 47–56. ISBN 978-1-349-29451-0.
  15. ^ Perry, Mike W. (1998-07-01). "Publication History of C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity". C. S. Lewis Web. Retrieved 2013-12-02.
  16. ^ Jon Tuska (1988). In Manors and Alleys: A Casebook on the American Detective Film. Greenwood Press. p. 106. ISBN 978-0-313-25007-1.
  17. ^ Rotman, Liviu (2008). Demnitate în vremuri de restriște. Bucharest: Editura Hasefer, Federation of Jewish Communities of Romania & Elie Wiesel National Institute for Studying the Holocaust in Romania. pp. 174–177. ISBN 978-973-630-189-6.
  18. ^ Boia, Lucian (2012). Capcanele istoriei. Elita intelectuală românească între 1930 și 1950. Bucharest: Humanitas. pp. 238–245. ISBN 978-973-50-3533-4.
  19. ^ "Первые стихи о Бабьем Яре. Людмила Титова". Babiy-Yar.Livejournal.com. 2012-10-04. Archived from the original on 2013-04-07. Retrieved 2013-02-23.
  20. ^ Adams, J. Donald (1941-11-09). "Scott Fitzgerald's Last Novel". The New York Times. Retrieved 2014-01-08.
  21. ^ Epstien, Thomas (2004). "Vvedensky in Love". The New Arcadia Review. Boston College Honors Program. 2. Archived from the original on 2010-12-08. Retrieved 2006-12-08.
  22. ^ "Penguin Archive Timeline". University of Bristol. Retrieved 2013-10-30.
  23. ^ David H. Stam (November 2001). International Dictionary of Library Histories. Routledge. p. 700. ISBN 978-1-136-77785-1.
  24. ^ Some Yugoslav Novelists. Jugoslovenska knjiga. 1954. p. 15.
  25. ^ Ackroyd, Peter (1980). "Chronology". Ezra Pound and His World. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd. p. 118. ISBN 0500130698.
  26. ^ George Watson; Ian R. Willison (1972). The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. CUP Archive. p. 557.
  27. ^ T. A. Shippey (1996). Magill's Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature: Lest darkness fall. Salem Press. p. 559. ISBN 978-0-89356-909-9.
  28. ^ Keating, H. R. F. (1982). Whodunit? – a guide to crime, suspense and spy fiction. London: Windward. ISBN 0-7112-0249-4.
  29. ^ Hopkins, Chris (2007). English Fiction in the 1930s: Language, Genre, History. London: Continuum International Publishing Group. pp. 138–57. ISBN 0826489389.
  30. ^ Cox, Michael, ed. (2004). The Concise Oxford Chronology of English Literature. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-860634-6.
  31. ^ Daughter Vivyan Leonora Eyles (1909–1984) was still in Italy with her husband Mario Praz.
  32. ^ Bergan, Ronald (June 27, 2012). "Nora Ephron obituary". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved March 22, 2017.
  33. ^ Edward Vilga (1997). Acting Now: Conversations on Craft and Career. Rutgers University Press. p. 100. ISBN 978-0-8135-2403-0.
  34. ^ De Vera, Ruel (6 May 2018). "National Artist for Literature Cirilo F. Bautista, 76, writes 30". Philippine Daily Inquirer. Retrieved 7 May 2018.
  35. ^ Kerry Flattley; Chris Wallace-Crabbe (1993). From the Republic of Conscience: An International Anthology of Poetry. White Pine Press. p. 177. ISBN 978-1-877727-26-9.
  36. ^ John Mole (1993). Depending on the Light. Peterloo Poets. ISBN 978-1-871471-38-0.
  37. ^ Alba della Fazia Amoia; Professor Emeritus Alba Amoia; Bettina Liebowitz Knapp (2004). Multicultural Writers Since 1945: An A-to-Z Guide. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 410. ISBN 978-0-313-30688-4.
  38. ^ David Karashima (1 September 2020). Who We're Reading When We're Reading Murakami. Soft Skull Press. p. 92. ISBN 978-1-59376-590-3.
  39. ^ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition (UK library card required): Arnim, Mary Annette [May] von. Retrieved 5 March 2014.
  40. ^ "Virginia Woolf". The British Library. Retrieved 28 March 2019.
  41. ^ "Émile Nelligan | Canadian poet". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 17 April 2019.


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