1940 in literature

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

List of years in literature (table)
… 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 …
In poetry 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943
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Events

• January – The English literary magazine Horizon is first published in London, with Cyril Connolly, Peter Watson and Stephen Spender.
• February – Canadian writer Robertson Davies leaves the Old Vic repertory company in the U.K.
• March 11 – Ed Ricketts, John Steinbeck and six others leave Monterey for the Gulf of California on a marine invertebrate collecting expedition.
• April – Máirtín Ó Cadhain is interned by the Irish government at Curragh Camp, as a member of the Irish Republican Army.
• May 14 – The Battle of the Netherlands ends with the surrender of the main Dutch forces to Nazi German invaders. This evening, the gay Dutch Jewish writer Jacob Hiegentlich takes poison, dying four days later aged 33.
• June 5 – The 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 pleasure steamers in the Dunkirk evacuation, which ended the day before.
• July
  • Jean-Paul Sartre is taken prisoner by the Germans. Léopold Sédar Senghor also becomes a prisoner of war this year. P. G. Wodehouse is interned by the Germans 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 – In Uriage-les-Bains, Vichy France, Emmanuel Mounier and the Esprit circle establish a school of government and philosophy attuned to Catholic social teaching. Initially endorsing the Révolution nationale, Uriage is put off by Vichy's collaboration with Germany, and blends into the Christian left.
• 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, similarly destroyed.
• October
  • Grahame Greene's London house on Clapham Common Northside is destroyed by bombing, an event reflected in his novels The Ministry of Fear (1943) and The End of the Affair (1951).
  • Philip Larkin enters St John's College, Oxford.
• October 4 – Brian O'Nolan's first "Cruiskeen Lawn" humorous column is published in The Irish Times (Dublin). In the second column he assumes the pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen. The original columns are composed in Irish. He continues the column until the year of his death, 1966.
• December – Penguin Books launches its Puffin Books children's imprint in the United Kingdom with War on Land by James Holland.
• 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 Last Tycoon unfinished.
• December 29 – Heavy bombing causes a 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, including Longman, together with some 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). On dawn patrol as a fighter pilot, Douglas Blackwood sees his family's publishing business, William Blackwood, burning.
• The Russian poet Anna Akhmatova's collection From Six Books appears in the Soviet Union, but distribution is soon suspended, copies pulped and remaining issues prohibited.
• Wills & Hepworth of Loughborough launches its classic Ladybird Books in the United Kingdom with Bunnykin's Picnic Party: a story in verse for children with illustrations in colour.

New books

Fiction

• Thomas Armstrong – The Crowthers of Bankdam
• Frank Baker – Miss Hargreaves
• Pridi Banomyong – The King of the White Elephant
• Giorgio Bassani – Una città di pianura
• Henry Bellamann – Kings Row
• Karin Boye – Kallocain
• Douglas Brown and Christopher Serpell – Loss of Eden: a cautionary tale
• Heðin Brú – Feðgar á ferð (The Old Man and His Sons)
• 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 Carter Dickson)
  • Murder in the Submarine Zone (as Carter Dickson)
• Adolfo Bioy Casares – The Invention of Morel (La invención de Morel)
• 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
• Dorothy B. Hughes – The So Blue Marble
• Hammond Innes
  • The Trojan Horse
  • Wreckers Must Breathe
• Anna Kavan – Asylum Piece (short stories)
• Arthur Koestler – Darkness at Noon
• Carson McCullers – The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
• W. Somerset Maugham – The Mixture as Before (short stories)
• Nancy Mitford – Pigeon Pie
• John O'Hara – Pal Joey
• Raymond Postgate – Verdict of Twelve
• John Cowper Powys – Owen Glendower
• 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)
• C. P. Snow – George Passant (first in 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 Alice Tilton)
• Dylan Thomas – Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (short stories)
• Sachchidananda Vatsyayan – Shekhar: Ek Jivani
• Richard Wright – Native Son
• Xiao Hong (蕭紅) – Ma Bole (马伯乐)

Children and young people

• Enid Blyton – The Naughtiest Girl in the School
• Godfried Bomans – Eric in the Land of the Insects (Erik of het klein insectenboek)
• Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire – Abraham Lincoln
• Doris Gates – Blue Willow
• Dorothy Kunhardt – Pat the Bunny
• Phyllis Matthewman – Chloe Takes Control (first in the Danewood series of seven books)
• Arthur Ransome – The Big Six
• Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings – When the Whippoorwill
• Dr. Seuss – Horton Hatches the Egg
• Armstrong Sperry – Call It Courage
• Jakob Streit – Beatuslegenden
• Geoffrey Trease – Cue for Treason
• John R. Tunis – The Kid from Tomkinsville
• Laura Ingalls Wilder – The Long Winter

Drama

• Jean Anouilh – Léocadia
• Ugo Betti – Il cacciatore di anitre (The Duck Hunter)
• 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
• Terence Rattigan and Anthony Goldsmith – Follow My Leader (first performed)
• 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
• Bernard Leach – A Potter's Book
• 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)
• January 23 – Mario Levrero, Uruguayan novelist (died 2004)
• 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
• April 24 – Sue Grafton, American detective novelist (died 2017)
• May 1 – Bobbie Ann Mason, American novelist, short story writer, essayist and literary critic
• 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 performer
• July 31 – Fleur Jaeggy, Swiss-Italian fiction writer
• 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
• November 15 – René Avilés Fabila, Mexican writer (died 2016)
• November 20 – Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, American Indologist and translator
• December 5 – Peter Pohl, Swedish novelist
• December 29 – Brigitte Kronauer, German novelist (died 2019)

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 12 – Florence White, English food writer (born 1863
• March 16
  • Sir Thomas Little Heath, English classicist and translator (born 1861)
  • Selma Lagerlöf, Swedish children's writer and Nobel laureate (born 1858)
• April 13 – Mary Bathurst Deane, English novelist (born 1843)
• June 10 – Marcus Garvey, Jamaican journalist and publisher (born 1887)
• June 20 – Charley Chase, American screenwriter (born 1893)
• June 21 – Hendrik Marsman, Dutch poet (born 1899)
• August 4 – Ze'ev Jabotinsky, Russian-born Zionist leader, novelist and poet (heart attack, born 1880)
• August 7 – T. O'Conor Sloane, American editor (born 1851)
• September 8 – Constantin Banu, Romanian politician, journalist, cultural promoter and aphorist (born 1873)
• September 26 – W. H. Davies, Welsh poet (born 1871)
• November 27 – Nicolae Iorga, Romanian historian, politician, culture critic, poet and playwright (assassinated, born 1871)
• December 21 – F. Scott Fitzgerald, American novelist (born 1896)
• December 22 – Nathanael West, American screenwriter and satirist (born 1903)

Date unknown – Louise Compain, French feminist author (b. 1869)

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

In literature

• January – H. G. Wells' novel The Shape of Things to Come (1933) describes a clash between Germany and Poland this month initiating a ten-year world war.
• c. April–May – Jill Paton Walsh's novel A Presumption of Death (2002) is set around this time.
• May
  • Michael Dobbs' novel Never Surrender (2004) is set at this time.
  • Penelope Fitzgerald's novel Human Voices (1979) opens around this time.
  • Alan Judd's novel The Kaiser's Last Kiss (2003) opens around the time of the Battle of the Netherlands.
• Summer – H. E. Bates' novel A Moment in Time (1964) is set during the Battle of Britain.
• July – Jerrard Tickell's novel Appointment with Venus (1951) is set during the German occupation of the Channel Islands.
• October – Edmund Crispin's novel The Case of the Gilded Fly (1944) is set this month.
• Douglas Morey Ford's speculative fiction The Raid of Dover: A Romance of the Reign of Woman (1910), involving a German invasion, is set in this year.