1939 in literature

Events

Early – The Pocket Books mass-market paperback imprint is launched in the United States; the first of the nationally distributed titles is James Hilton's Lost Horizon.

January

American literary magazine The Kenyon Review, founded and edited by John Crowe Ransom, is first published.

American pulp science fiction magazine Startling Stories, edited by Mort Weisinger, is first published. It includes The Black Flame by Stanley G. Weinbaum as lead novel.

Eando Binder's short story "I, Robot" is published in American science fiction magazine Amazing Stories.

British literary quarterly The Criterion, founded and edited by T. S. Eliot, is published for the last time.

W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood set sail from England for the United States.

January/February – Poetry London: a Bi-Monthly of Modern Verse and Criticism, founded and edited by Tambimuttu (with Dylan Thomas and others), is first published.

February 6 – Raymond Chandler's hardboiled California private detective Philip Marlowe is introduced in his first full-length work of crime fiction, The Big Sleep (reworking elements from earlier short stories), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the United States.

March – Isaac Asimov's first published short story, "Marooned off Vesta", appears in Astounding Science-Fiction magazine.

March 4 – BBC Television broadcasts one of the first television plays specially written for the medium, Condemned To Be Shot by R. E. J. (Reginald?) Brooke, live from its London studios at Alexandra Palace. The production is also notable for the use of a camera as the first-person perspective of the play's unseen central character.

March 31 – Release of the 20th Century Fox film version of The Hound of the Baskervilles, first of a Sherlock Holmes film series starring Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson.

April 13 – Release of the United Artists film version of Wuthering Heights, starring Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier.

May – Jorge Luis Borges' first short story in his later characteristic style, "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote", is published in the Buenos Aires literary magazine Sur.

May 4 – James Joyce's last work, Finnegans Wake, is published complete by Faber and Faber in London.

May 15 – Russian writer Isaac Babel is arrested by the NKVD at his dacha as part of the Great Purge in the Soviet Union and incarcerated in the Lubyanka Building in Moscow.

August – Robert A. Heinlein's first published short story, "Life-Line", appears in Astounding Science-Fiction.

c. August – Ernest Vincent Wright publishes his lipogrammatic novel Gadsby, "a story of over 50,000 words without using the letter "E"", in Los Angeles a few months before his death on October 7.

Before September – Following a pledge drive led by Renaud de Jouvenel and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Romanian poet Benjamin Fondane is naturalized French. In September, he is conscripted into the French Army, to serve in the Phony War.

September 2 – Jean-Paul Sartre is conscripted into the French Army where he will serve as a meteorologist.

September 18 – Polish painter, playwright and novelist Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (b. 1885) commits suicide following the Soviet invasion of Poland.

September/October – American reprint science fiction and fantasy pulp magazine Famous Fantastic Mysteries begins publication in New York.

Fall – Frank Herbert lies about his age to get his first job as a local newspaper reporter.

November – The teenage Brendan Behan is arrested in Liverpool for possession of explosives.

November 8 – Lindsay and Crouse's stage adaptation of Clarence Day's Life with Father opens at the Empire Theatre (42nd Street) in New York. Running until 12 July 1947, it becomes the all-time longest-running non-musical play in Broadway theatre.

Late – Captain Marvel makes his first appearance, in Whiz Comics #2 (cover date February 1940).

—From Finnegans Wake

Fiction

Eric Ambler – The Mask of Dimitrios

Sholem Asch – The Nazarene

William Attaway – Let Me Breathe Thunder

H. E. Bates – My Uncle Silas (short stories)

Arna Wendell Bontemps – Drums at Dusk

Pearl S. Buck – The Patriot

Karel Čapek – Život a dílo skladatele Foltýna (Life and Work of the Composer Foltýn, translated as The Cheat, posthumous, unfinished)

Joyce Carey – Mister Johnson

John Dickson Carr

The Black Spectacles

The Problem of the Wire Cage

The Reader is Warned (as Carter Dickson)

Drop to His Death (with John Rhode)

Aimé Césaire – "Cahier d'un retour au pays natal" (in Volontés, August)

Raymond Chandler – The Big Sleep

James Hadley Chase – No Orchids for Miss Blandish

Agatha Christie

Murder is Easy

The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories

Ten Little Niggers

Jeffrey Dell – Nobody Ordered Wolves

Pierre Drieu La Rochelle – Gilles

John Fante – Ask the Dust

William Faulkner – If I Forget Thee Jerusalem (The Wild Palms/Old Man)

Vardis Fisher – Children of God

Zona Gale – Magna

Konstantine Gamsakhurdia – The Right Hand of the Grand Master (დიდოსტატის კონსტანტინეს მარჯვენა)

Henry Green – Party Going

Ernest Hemingway – The Snows of Kilimanjaro

Zora Neale Hurston – Moses, Man of the Mountain

Aldous Huxley – After Many a Summer

Christopher Isherwood – Goodbye to Berlin

James Joyce – Finnegans Wake

Arthur Koestler – The Gladiators

Richard Llewellyn – How Green Was My Valley

H. P. Lovecraft – The Outsider and Others

Christopher Morley – Kitty Foyle

Ian Niall (as John McNeillie) – Wigtown Ploughman

Flann O'Brien – At Swim-Two-Birds

John O'Hara – Files on Parade

George Orwell – Coming Up for Air

Elliot Paul – The Mysterious Mickey Finn

Ellery Queen – The Dragon's Teeth

Katherine Anne Porter – Pale Horse, Pale Rider

Clayton Rawson – The Footprints on the Ceiling

Seymour Reit- The Friendly Ghost

Dorothy L. Sayers – In the Teeth of the Evidence

Pierre Schaeffer – Chlothar Nicole (Clotaire Nicole)

John Steinbeck – The Grapes of Wrath

Rex Stout – Some Buried Caesar

Jan Struther – Mrs. Miniver (short stories)

Phoebe Atwood Taylor

Spring Harrowing

Cold Steal (as by Alice Tilton)

Dalton Trumbo – Johnny Got His Gun

S. S. Van Dine – The Winter Murder Case

Simon Vestdijk – Sint Sebastiaan (first book chronologically in the Anton Wachter cycle)

Elio Vittorini – Conversations in Sicily (Conversazione in Sicilia)

Nathanael West – The Day of the Locust

Ernest Vincent Wright – Gadsby

Marguerite Yourcenar – Coup de Grâce

Children and young people

Ludwig Bemelmans – Madeline (first in an eponymous series of seven books)

Enid Blyton – The Enchanted Wood

Edgar Rice Burroughs – Tarzan the Magnificent

Lavinia R. Davis – Hobby Horse Hill

Hardie Gramatky – Little Toot

Carolyn Haywood – "B" is for Betsy (first in Betsy series)

Robert Lawson – Ben and Me: An Astonishing Life of Benjamin Franklin By His Good Mouse Amos

Hilda Lewis – The Ship That Flew

Lucy Maud Montgomery – Anne of Ingleside

Violet Needham – The Black Riders (first in the Stormy Petrel series)

Carola Oman – Alfred, King of the English

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

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings – The Yearling

Joan G. Robinson – A Stands for Angel

Felix Salten – Bambis Kinder, eine Familie in Walde (Bambi's Children)

Alison Uttley – A Traveller in Time

Laura Ingalls Wilder – By the Shores of Silver Lake

Ursula Moray Williams – Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse

Drama

Philip Barry – The Philadelphia Story

Bertolt Brecht

Life of Galileo (Leben des Galilei; completed)

Mother Courage and Her Children (Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder; written)

T. S. Eliot – The Family Reunion

Jean Giraudoux – Ondine

Lillian Hellman – The Little Foxes

George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart – The Man Who Came to Dinner

Joseph Kesselring – Arsenic and Old Lace

Clare Boothe Luce – Margin of Error

William Saroyan – The Time of Your Life

Poetry

W. H. Auden

Journey to a War (with diary entries and nonfiction prose by Christopher Isherwood; March 16)

"September 1, 1939" (in The New Republic (U.S.) October 18)

Aimé Césaire – Cahier d’un retour au pays natal

T. S. Eliot – Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats

José Gorostiza – Muerte sin fin (Death without End)

Javier del Granado – Rosas Pálidas (Pale Roses)

Changampuzha Krishna Pillai – Rahtapuspangal

Christopher Smart – Jubilate Agno (as Rejoice in the Lamb: A Song from Bedlam, edited by W. F. Stead; completed by 1763)

Non-fiction

Adrian Bell – Men and the Fields

Lord David Cecil – The Young Melbourne and the Story of his Marriage with Caroline Lamb

Savitri Devi – A Warning to the Hindus

Erwin Panofsky – Studies in Iconology

Ed Ricketts – Between Pacific Tides

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry – Wind, Sand and Stars (Terre des hommes)

Gladys Storey – Dickens and Daughter

Ronald Syme – The Roman Revolution

Bill W. and Dr. Bob – The Big Book

Gamel Woolsey – Death's Other Kingdom

Births

January 29 – Germaine Greer, Australian-born feminist author

March 25 – Toni Cade Bambara, African-American writer (died 1995)

April 12 – Alan Ayckbourn, English dramatist

April 13 – Seamus Heaney, Irish poet (died 2013)

May 4 – Amos Oz (Amos Klausner), Israeli author

June 5 – Margaret Drabble, English novelist

June 14 – Penelope Farmer, English children's writer

July 2 – Ferdinand Mount, English journalist and novelist

August 1 – Robert James Waller, American novelist

October 6 – Melvyn Bragg, English novelist, critic and television presenter

October 9 – John Pilger, Australian-born journalist and documentary filmmaker

October 10 – Clive James, Australian writer, humorist and television personality

November 17 – Auberon Waugh, English journalist and novelist (died 2001)

November 18 – Margaret Atwood, Canadian novelist and poet

November 25 – Shelagh Delaney, English dramatist (died 2011)

December 18 – Michael Moorcock, English science fiction writer

Deaths

January 8 – Caton Theodorian, Romanian dramatist and novelist (born 1871)

January 28 – W. B. Yeats, Irish poet (born 1865)

February 18 – Okamoto Kanoko (岡本 かの子, Ohnuki Kano), Japanese tanka poet (born 1899)

February 22 – Antonio Machado, Spanish poet (born 1875)

March 7 – Ludwig Fulda, German poet and playwright (born 1862)

March 23 – Richard Halliburton, American travel writer (born 1900)

April 11 – S. S. Van Dine (Willard Huntington Wright), American crime novelist and art critic (born 1888)

May 23 – Margarete Böhme, German novelist (born 1867)

May 27 – Joseph Roth, Austrian novelist (born 1894)

June 13 – Volter Kilpi, Finnish novelist (born 1874)

June 14 – Vladislav Khodasevich, Russian poet and critic (born 1886)

June 26 – Ford Madox Ford (Ford Hermann Hueffer), English novelist (born 1873)

July 8 – Havelock Ellis, American sexual psychologist and writer (born 1859)

August 7 – Leonard Merrick, English novelist (born 1864)

August 23 – Robin Hyde (Iris Guiver Wilkinson), South African-born New Zealand poet and novelist (born 1906)

September 6 – Arthur Rackham, English book illustrator (born 1867)

September 19 – Ethel M. Dell, English romantic novelist (born 1881)

October 23 – Zane Grey, American western novelist (born 1872)

December 2 – Llewelyn Powys, English novelist and autobiographer (born 1884)

Unknown date – Solomon Cleaver, Canadian storyteller and novelist (born 1855)

Awards

Carnegie Medal for children's literature: Eleanor Doorly, The Radium Woman

James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: Aldous Huxley After Many a Summer Dies the Swan

James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: David C. Douglas, English Scholars

Newbery Medal for children's literature: Elizabeth Enright, Thimble Summer

Nobel Prize for literature: Frans Eemil Sillanpää

Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Robert E. Sherwood, Abe Lincoln in Illinois

Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: John Gould Fletcher: Selected Poems

Pulitzer Prize for the Novel: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings – The Yearling

In fiction

Works of literature set around the outbreak of World War II include

Aharon Appelfeld – Badenheim 1939 (1978)

John Dickson Carr – In Spite of Thunder (1960)

Patrick Hamilton – Hangover Square (1941)

Brian Moore – The Emperor of Ice-Cream (1965)

Anthony Powell – The Kindly Ones (1962)

Erich Maria Remarque – Arc de Triomphe (1945)

Nevil Shute – Pied Piper (1942)

Evelyn Waugh – Put Out More Flags (1942)

Mary Wesley – The Camomile Lawn (1984)