1937 in literature

Events

January 9 – The first issue of Look magazine goes on sale in the United States.

January 19 – BBC Television broadcasts The Underground Murder Mystery by J. Bissell Thomas from its London station, the first play written for television.

April – Irish writers Elizabeth Bowen and Seán Ó Faoláin first meet, in London.

May 14 – BBC Television broadcasts a 30-minute excerpt of Twelfth Night, the first known instance of a Shakespeare play televised. Among the cast are Peggy Ashcroft and Greer Garson.

May 21 – Penguin Books launches its Pelican Books sixpenny paperback non-fiction imprint in the U.K. with a 2-volume edition of Bernard Shaw's The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism.

June – John Cowper Powys visits Sycharth, birthplace of Owain Glyndŵr, which becomes the inspiration for his 1940 novel Owen Glendower.

June 30 – Poems of colonial American pastor Edward Taylor (d. 1729), discovered by Thomas H Johnson, are published in The New England Quarterly.

Summer – American-born writer Thomas Quinn Curtiss meets German-born novelist Klaus Mann in Europe and they form a relationship.

July

Establishment of Buchenwald concentration camp in Nazi Germany around the Goethe Oak.

American academic librarian Randolph Greenfield Adams, in a controversial Library Quarterly essay "Librarians as Enemies of Books", complains about librarians de-emphasizing books and scholarship in favor of other responsibilities.

July 4 – The Lost Colony historical drama by Paul Green is first performed at an outdoor theater in the location where it is set, Roanoke Island, North Carolina.

July 31 – Stephen Vincent Benét's post-apocalyptic short story "By the Waters of Babylon", inspired by April's Bombing of Guernica, is published in The Saturday Evening Post (U.S.) as "The Place of the Gods".

September 10 – Soviet playwright Sergei Tretyakov commits suicide while under sentence of death at Butyrka prison in Moscow as part of the Great Purge.

September 21 – J. R. R. Tolkien's juvenile fantasy novel The Hobbit, or There and Back Again is published in England by George Allen & Unwin on the recommendation of young Rayner Unwin.

September 29 – French playwright Antonin Artaud is expelled from Ireland.

October 6 – The fictional character 'Mrs. Miniver' first appears in the column on domestic life written by 'Jan Struther' for The Times (London).

November 11 (Armistice Day) – BBC Television broadcasts Journey's End by R. C. Sherriff (1928, set on the Western Front (World War I) in 1918), the first full-length television adaptation of a stage play. Reginald Tate plays the lead, a rôle he has performed extensively in the theatre.

Undated

The National Library of Iran is inaugurated in Tehran.

The future novelist Angus Wilson becomes a book cataloguer at the British Museum Library in London.

Fiction

Felix Aderca – Orașele înecate

Eric Ambler – Uncommon Danger

Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay – Chander Pahar (চাঁদের পাহড়, Mountain of the Moon)

Vicki Baum – Love and Death in Bali (Liebe und Tod auf Bali)

Georges Bernanos – Mouchette

Morley Callaghan – More Joy in Heaven

John Dickson Carr (as Carter Dickson) – The Ten Teacups

Agatha Christie

Dumb Witness

Death on the Nile

Murder in the Mews

Stuart Cloete – Turning Wheels

Murray Constantine – Swastika Night

A. J. Cronin – The Citadel

James Curtis – There Ain't No Justice

Isak Dinesen – Out of Africa

Pierre Drieu La Rochelle – Rêveuse bourgeoisie

Lawrence Durrell writing as Charles Norden – Panic Spring

Hans Fallada – Wolf Among Wolves (Wolf unter Wölfen)

Max Frisch – An Answer from the Silence (Antwort aus der Stille)

Zona Gale – Light Woman

Witold Gombrowicz – Ferdydurke

Sadegh Hedayat – The Blind Owl (بوف کور, Boof-e koor)

Ernest Hemingway – To Have and Have Not

Katharine Hull and Pamela Whitlock – The Far-Distant Oxus

Zora Neale Hurston – Their Eyes Were Watching God

Michael Innes – Hamlet, Revenge!

Franz Kafka (posthumously translated by Willa and Edwin Muir) – The Trial (first English translation of Der Process)

Irmgard Keun – After Midnight (Nach Mitternacht)

Kalki Krishnamurthy – Kalvaninn Kaadhali

Halldór Laxness – Ljós heimsins (The Light of the World) — Part I, Heimsljós (World Light)

Alexander Lernet-Holenia

Der Mann im Hut

Mona Lisa

Meyer Levin – The Old Bunch

A.E.W. Mason – The Drum

Cameron McCabe – The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor

Compton Mackenzie – The East Wind of Love (first in The Four Winds of Love series of six books)

W. Somerset Maugham – Theatre

R. K. Narayan – The Bachelor of Arts

Elliot Paul – Life and Death of a Spanish Town

Robert Prechtl – Titanic

Ellery Queen – The Door Between

"Kurban Said" – Ali und Nino

Ruth Sawyer – Roller Skates

Dorothy L. Sayers – Busman's Honeymoon

Bruno Schulz – Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (Sanatorium Pod Klepsydrą)

Naoya Shiga (志賀 直哉) – A Dark Night's Passing (暗夜行路, An'ya Kōro)

Olaf Stapledon – Star Maker

John Steinbeck – Of Mice and Men

Rex Stout – The Red Box

Antal Szerb – Journey by Moonlight (Utas és holdvilág)

Phoebe Atwood Taylor

Figure Away

Octagon House

Beginning with a Bash (as by Alice Tilton)

Mika Waltari – A Stranger Came to the Farm (Vieras mies tuli taloon)

Winifred Watson – Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

Charles Williams – Descent into Hell

Virginia Woolf – The Years

Children and young people

Enid Blyton – The Adventures of the Wishing-Chair

C. S. Forester – The Happy Return (also as Beat to Quarters)

Eve Garnett – The Family from One End Street

Kornel Makuszyński – Awantura o Basię (Argument about Basia)

Carola Oman – Robin Hood

Arthur Ransome – We Didn't Mean To Go To Sea

Kate Seredy – The White Stag

J. R. R. Tolkien – The Hobbit

Henry Winterfeld (as Manfred Michael) – Timpetill – Die Stadt ohne Eltern (Timpetill – Parentless City, translated 1963 as Trouble at Timpetill)

Laura Ingalls Wilder – On the Banks of Plum Creek

Drama

Bertolt Brecht with Margarete Steffin – Die Gewehre der Frau Carrar (adapted from J. M. Synge's Señora Carrar's Rifles)

Karel Čapek – The White Disease (Bílá nemoc)

Paul Vincent Carroll – Shadow and Substance

Arthur Kober – "Having Wonderful Time"

Robert McLellan – Jamie the Saxt

Robert Morley – Goodness, How Sad

J. B. Priestley – Time and the Conways

Hella Wuolijoki writing as Juhani Tervapää – Juurakon Hulda

John Ferguson, editor – Seven Famous One-Act Plays (published)

Non-fiction

Oscar Bagnall – The Origin and Properties of the Human Aura

Hilaire Belloc – The Crusades: the World's Debate

Alf K. Berle and L. Sprague de Camp – Inventions and Their Management

Robert Byron – The Road to Oxiana

Manuel Chaves Nogales – A sangre y fuego: Héroes, bestias y mártires de España (Fire and sword: heroes, beasts and martyrs of Spain)

Napoleon Hill – Think and Grow Rich

Walter Lippmann – The Good Society

George Orwell – The Road to Wigan Pier

Eric Partridge – A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English

Births

January 1 – John Fuller, English poet

January 7 – Ian La Frenais, English TV comedy writer

January 8 – Leon Forrest, African American novelist and essayist

January 9 – Judith Krantz, American novelist

January 13 – Jean D'Costa, Jamaican children's novelist

January 22 – Joseph Wambaugh, American mystery novelist and non-fiction writer

January 23 – Juan Radrigán, Chilean playwright (died 2016)

February 11 – Maryse Condé, Guadeloupe historical fiction writer

February 21 – Jilly Cooper, English novelist and journalist

March 15 – Valentin Rasputin, Russian writer (died 2015)

April 10 – Bella Akhmadulina, Russian poet (died 2010)

April 29 – Jill Paton Walsh (Gillian Bliss), English novelist

May 8 – Thomas Pynchon, American novelist

May 13

Roger Zelazny, American writer of fantasy and science fiction

Roch Carrier, Canadian novelist and short-story writer

June 1 – Colleen McCullough, Australian novelist (died 2015)

June 16 – Erich Segal, American novelist (died 2010)

July 3 – Tom Stoppard (Tomáš Straussler), Czech-born English dramatist

August 5 – Carla Lane (Romana Barrack), English comedy writer

August 19

Richard Ingrams, English editor

Alexander Vampilov, Russian dramatist (drowned 1972)

September 5 – Dick Clement, English TV comedy writer

October 4 – Jackie Collins, English-born romance novelist (died 2015)

October 7 – Christopher Booker, English journalist and editor

November 9 – Roger McGough, English poet

November 17 – Peter Cook, English comedian, satirist and writer (died 1995)

December 3 – Binod Bihari Verma, Maithili man of letters

December 11 – Jim Harrison, American novelist and poet

December 22

David F. Case, American novelist and short story writer

Charlotte Lamb (Sheila Holland, Sheila Coates, etc.), English romantic novelist (died 2000)

Unknown dates

Jan Karon (Janice Wilson), American novelist and children's writer

Parijat (Bishnu Kumari Waiba), Nepalese novelist and poet (died 1993)

Deaths

February 19

Edward Garnett, English critic (born 1868)

Horacio Quiroga, Uruguayan short story writer (suicide, born 1878)

March 7 – Tomas O'Crohan, Irish Gaelic writer and fisherman (born 1856)

March 8 – Albert Verwey, Dutch poet (born 1865)

March 15 – H. P. Lovecraft, American horror writer (intestinal cancer, born 1890)

March 25 – John Drinkwater, poet and dramatist (born 1882)

May 20 – Frederic Taber Cooper, American editor and writer (born 1864)

June 13 – William F. Lloyd, English-born Newfoundland journalist and prime minister (born 1864)

June 19 – J. M. Barrie, Scottish novelist and dramatist (born 1860)

June 22 – Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, Malagasy poet (suicide, born 1901 or 1903)

July 18 – Julian Bell, English poet (killed in Spanish Civil War, born 1908)

August 11 – Edith Wharton (Edith Newbold Jones), American novelist and short-story writer (born 1862)

August 14 – H. C. McNeile (Sapper), English novelist and soldier (born 1888)

September 13 – Ellis Parker Butler, American novelist and essayist (born 1869)

October 16 – Jean de Brunhoff, French children's author and illustrator (born 1899)

October 17 – Florence Dugdale, English children's writer, widow of Thomas Hardy (cancer, born 1879)

October 22 – Chūya Nakahara (中原 中也), Japanese poet (meningitis, born 1907)

October 31 – Ralph Connor, Canadian novelist (born 1860)

December 24 – Elizabeth Haldane, Scottish author, philosopher and suffragist (born 1862)

December 26 – Ivor Gurney, English war poet and composer (tuberculosis, born 1890)

December 29 – Don Marquis, American poet (stroke, born 1878)

Unknown date – W. F. Harvey, English short-story writer (born 1885)

Awards

Carnegie Medal for children's literature: Eve Garnett, The Family From One End Street

James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: Neil M. Gunn, Highland River

James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: Lord Eustace Percy, John Knox

Newbery Medal for children's literature: Ruth Sawyer, Roller Skates

Nobel Prize for literature: Roger Martin du Gard

Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Moss Hart, George S. Kaufman, You Can't Take It with You

Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Robert Frost: A Further Range

Pulitzer Prize for the Novel: Margaret Mitchell – Gone with the Wind

King's Gold Medal for Poetry: W. H. Auden