1940 in literature

This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1940.

Events

• January – English literary magazine Horizon is first published in London by Cyril Connolly, Peter Watson and Stephen Spender.
• February – Canadian writer Robertson Davies leaves the Old Vic repertory company in the U.K.
• April – Máirtín Ó Cadhain is interned by the Irish government at Curragh Camp as a member of the Irish Republican Army.
• June 5 – English novelist J. B. Priestley broadcasts his first Sunday evening radio Postscript, "An excursion to hell", on the BBC Home Service in the U.K., marking the role of the pleasure steamers in the Dunkirk evacuation concluded the day before.
• July
  • Jean-Paul Sartre is taken prisoner by the Germans.^[1] Léopold Sédar Senghor also becomes a prisoner of war this year. P. G. Wodehouse is interned as an enemy alien.
  • American science fiction and fantasy pulp magazine Fantastic Novels begins its first run.
• July 26 – Release of the movie adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice with Aldous Huxley as a screenwriter.
• September 10 – Virginia Woolf's London house at 37 Mecklenburgh Square is destroyed by bombing. On October 18 she sees the ruins of her previous home, 52 Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury, also destroyed in The Blitz.^[2]
• December – Penguin Books launches its Puffin Books children's imprint in the United Kingdom with publication of "Puffin Picture Book No. 1", War on Land, by James Holland.^[3]
• December 21 – F. Scott Fitzgerald dies of a heart attack aged 44 in the apartment of Hollywood gossip columnist Sheilah Graham leaving his novel The Love of the Last Tycoon unfinished.
• December 29 – Heavy bombing causes the Second Great Fire of London, destroying the premises of Simpkin, Marshall, the U.K.'s largest book wholesaler, and of many publishers also in the Paternoster Row area of the city, including Longman, together with around 25,000 volumes in the Guildhall Library's stores and a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in a jewelled binding by Sangorski & Sutcliffe (1939); altogether Britain's worst book burning.^[4] On dawn patrol, Douglas Blackwood, a fighter pilot at this time, is able to see his family's publishing business, William Blackwood, burning.^[5]
• Wills & Hepworth of Loughborough launch their classic Ladybird Books format in the United Kingdom with publication of Bunnykin's Picnic Party: a story in verse for children with illustrations in colour.^[6]

New book

• Pridi Banomyong – The King of the White Elephant
• Giorgio Bassani – Una città di pianura
• Henry Bellamann – King's Row
• Adolfo Bioy Casares – The Invention of Morel (La invención de Morel)
• Karin Boye – Kallocain
• Douglas Brown and Christopher Serpell – Loss of Eden: a cautionary tale
• Edgar Rice Burroughs – Synthetic Men of Mars
• Dino Buzzati – The Tartar Steppe (Il deserto dei Tartari)
• Erskine Caldwell – Trouble in July
• Taylor Caldwell – The Earth is the Lord's
• Joyce Carey – Charley is My Darling
• John Dickson Carr
  • The Department of Queer Complaints
  • The Man Who Could Not Shudder
  • And So To Murder (as by Carter Dickson)
  • Murder in the Submarine Zone (as by Carter Dickson)
• Willa Cather – Sapphira And The Slave
• Raymond Chandler – Farewell, My Lovely
• Agatha Christie
  • Sad Cypress
  • One, Two, Buckle My Shoe
• Walter Clark – The Ox-bow Incident
• James Daugherty – Daniel Boone
• Georges Duhamel – Les Maîtres
• Mircea Eliade – The Secret of Dr. Honigberger (Secretul doctorului Honigberger; published with Nights at Serampore)
• Graham Greene – The Power and the Glory
• Ernest Hemingway – For Whom the Bell Tolls
• Georgette Heyer – The Corinthian
• Anna Kavan – Asylum Piece (short stories)
• Arthur Koestler – Darkness at Noon
• Dorothy Kunhardt – Pat the Bunny
• Carson McCullers – The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
• John O'Hara – Pal Joey
• Raymond Postgate – Verdict of Twelve
• John Cowper Powys – Owen Glendower
• Arthur Ransome – The Big Six
• Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings – When the Whippoorwill
• Clayton Rawson -- The Headless Lady
• Michael Sadleir – Fanny by Gaslight
• Mikhail Sholokov – The Don Flows Home to the Sea (English translation of part 2 of Тихий Дон (Tikhii Don, "The Quiet Don"))
• Dr. Seuss – Horton Hatches the Egg
• C. P. Snow – George Passant (first of the Strangers and Brothers series)
• Christina Stead – The Man Who Loved Children
• Rex Stout
  • Over My Dead Body
  • Where There's a Will
• Phoebe Atwood Taylor
  • The Criminal C.O.D.
  • The Deadly Sunshade
  • The Left Leg (as by Alice Tilton)
• Dylan Thomas – Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (short stories)
• Richard Wright – Native Son
• Xiao Hong – Ma Bole (马伯乐)

New drama

• Bertolt Brecht – Mr Puntila and his Man Matti (Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti, written)
• Agatha Christie – Peril at End House
• Jean Cocteau – Le Bel Indifférent
• Artturi Järviluoma – Pohjalaisia
• Lawrence Riley – Return Engagement
• George Shiels – The Rugged Path
• Emlyn Williams – The Corn Is Green

Non-fiction

• Mortimer J. Adler – How to Read a Book
• "Cato" (Michael Foot and others) – Guilty Men
• George Gamow – The Birth and Death of the Sun
• G. H. Hardy – A Mathematician's Apology
• C. S. Lewis – The Problem of Pain
• Arthur Marder – The Anatomy of British Sea Power: a history of British naval policy in the pre-Dreadnought era, 1880-1905
• A. A. Milne – War with Honour
• Malcolm Muggeridge – The Thirties
• Edmund Wilson – To the Finland Station

Births

• January 4 – Gao Xingjian (高行健), Chinese novelist
• January 15 – Ted Lewis, English novelist (died 1982)
• February 9 – J. M. Coetzee, South African novelist
• March 16 – Bernardo Bertolucci, Italian writer and film director
• March 23 – Ama Ata Aidoo, Ghanaian playwright
• March 28 – Russell Banks, American novelist
• April 13 – J. M. G. Le Clézio, French novelist
• April 15 – Jeffrey Archer, English novelist, politician and perjurer
• May 7 – Angela Carter, English novelist (died 1992)
• May 8 – Peter Benchley, American novelist (died 2006)
• May 13 – Bruce Chatwin, English novelist and travel writer (died 1989)
• May 24 – Joseph Brodsky, Russian-born American poet and essayist (died 1996)
• May 28 – Maeve Binchy, Irish novelist (died 2012)
• July 17 – Tim Brooke-Taylor, English comedy writer and actor
• September 3 – Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan journalist, writer and novelist (died 2015)
• October 15 – Fanny Howe, American poet, novelist and short story writer
• October 20 – Robert Pinsky, American poet
• December 5 – Peter Pohl, Swedish novelist

Deaths

• January 1 – Panuganti Lakshminarasimha Rao, Indian writer (born 1865)
• January 5 – Humbert Wolfe, British poet and epigrammist (born 1885)
• January 27 – Isaak Babel, Russian journalist and dramatist (executed, born 1894)
• February 11 – John Buchan, Scottish novelist (born 1875)
• February 29 – E. F. Benson, English novelist, biographer, memoirist and short-story writer (born 1867)
• March 7 – Edwin Markham, American poet (born 1852)
• March 10 – Mikhail Bulgakov, Russian novelist and playwright (born 1891)
• March 16
  • Sir Thomas Little Heath, English classicist and translator (born 1861)
  • Selma Lagerlöf, Swedish children's writer and Nobel laureate (born 1858)
• June 10 – Marcus Garvey, Jamaican journalist and publisher (born 1887)
• June 20 – Charley Chase, American screenwriter (born 1893)
• August 7 – T. O'Conor Sloane, American editor (born 1851)
• September 26 – W. H. Davies, Welsh poet (born 1871)
• December 21 – F. Scott Fitzgerald, American novelist (born 1896)
• December 22 – Nathanael West, American screenwriter and satirist (born 1903)

Awards

• Carnegie Medal for children's literature: Kitty Barne, Visitors from London
• James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: Charles Morgan, The Voyage
• James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: Hilda F. M. Prescott, Spanish Tudor: Mary I of England
• Newbery Medal for children's literature: James Daugherty, Daniel Boone
• Nobel Prize for literature: not awarded
• Pulitzer Prize for Drama: William Saroyan, The Time of Your Life
• Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Mark Van Doren: Collected Poems
• Pulitzer Prize for the Novel: John Steinbeck – The Grapes of Wrath
• King's Gold Medal for Poetry: Michael Thwaites

References