Rahul Sharma (Editor)

1947 in literature

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This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1947.

Contents

Events

  • January – English actor-manager Geoffrey Kendal arrives in India with his touring repertory theatre company "Shakespeareana" which will perform Shakespeare in towns and villages across the country for several decades.
  • January 29 – Arthur Miller's play All My Sons opens at the Coronet Theatre in New York directed by Elia Kazan and starring Ed Begley, the writer's first Broadway success.
  • February 17 – On the death of Montserrat-born British fantasy fiction writer M. P. Shiel aged 81 in Chichester, his supposed title to the Kingdom of Redonda passes to London poet John Gawsworth.
  • March – Landfall literary magazine is founded by Charles Brasch and first published by Caxton Press (New Zealand); it becomes that country's oldest literary journal.
  • April
  • The opening night of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's first play, Es steht geschrieben ("It Is Written") provokes fights amongst the audience.
  • Discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Qumran Caves becomes public.
  • April 6 – The 1st Tony Awards for excellence in live American theatre are awarded at the Waldorf Astoria New York.
  • May/June – English novelist T. H. White buys a house in Saint Anne, Alderney in the Channel Islands where he will spend the remainder of his life.
  • June – Publication begins of Vice Versa in Los Angeles, the first known periodical published for lesbians, edited by 'Lisa Ben'.
  • June 24 – Kenneth Arnold claims to have seen nine flying saucers near Mount Rainier, Washington, starting a huge amount of enthusiasm in science fiction writers and scientists.
  • June 25 – The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank is published for the first time as Het Achterhuis: Dagboekbrieven 14 juni 1942 – 1 augustus 1944 ("The Annex: Diary Notes from 14 June 1942 – 1 August 1944") in Amsterdam, two years after the writer's death in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
  • August 24 – First Edinburgh Festival of the Arts opens in Scotland.
  • September – The German literary association Group 47 forms.
  • September 12 – American novelist John Dos Passos is in an automobile accident that kills his wife and costs him the sight in one eye.
  • November – Muriel Spark becomes editor of Poetry Review in London from this month's issue.
  • November 24 – McCarthyism: Dalton Trumbo refuses to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Ring Lardner, Jr., attends, but refuses to answer any questions. The United States House of Representatives votes 346 – 17 to approve citations of Contempt of Congress against all the "Hollywood Ten" screenwriters and directors who have refused to co-operate with the Committee concerning allegations of communist influences in the movie business. The ten men are blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studios on the following day.
  • December 23 – Tennessee Williams' play A Streetcar Named Desire opens at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway in New York directed by Elia Kazan and starring Jessica Tandy and Marlon Brando in his first major stage rôle.
  • Woody Guthrie completes his novel House of Earth; it will not be published until 2013.
  • Jack Kerouac makes the journey which he will later chronicle in his book On the Road.
  • Séamus Ó Néill's novel Tonn Tuile is the first book published by Irish language publisher Sáirséal agus Dill in Dublin.
  • Dorothy Parker divorces Alan Campbell for the first time.
  • Pramoedya Ananta Toer begins a 2-year imprisonment by the Dutch authorities in Jakarta for his support for the Indonesian National Revolution, during which he begins to write his first major novel, Perburuan ("The Fugitive", 1950).

    • Fiction

  • Cynthia Asquith – This Mortal Coil
  • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey – Miss Hickory
  • François Boyer – Les Jeux inconnus
  • Ray Bradbury – Dark Carnival (debut book)
  • John Horne Burns – The Gallery
  • Italo Calvino – The Path to the Nest of Spiders (Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno)
  • Albert Camus – The Plague (La Peste)
  • John Dickson Carr
  • The Sleeping Sphinx
  • Dr. Fell, Detective, and Other Stories
  • Agatha Christie – The Labours of Hercules
  • Thomas B. Costain – The Moneyman
  • Johan Daisne – The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short
  • Hans Fallada (posthumous) – Every Man Dies Alone (Jeder stirbt für sich allein)
  • Jean Genet – Querelle de Brest
  • Jean Giono – Un roi sans divertissement
  • Robert A. Heinlein – Rocket Ship Galileo
  • Carl Jacobi – Revelations in Black
  • Yasunari Kawabata (川端 康成) – Snow Country (雪国, Yukiguni)
  • Fritz Leiber, Jr. – Night's Black Agents
  • Malcolm Lowry – Under the Volcano
  • Thomas Mann – Doctor Faustus (Doktor Faustus: Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn, erzählt von einem Freunde)
  • Gabriel García Márquez – Eyes of a Blue Dog (Ojos de perro azul)
  • W. Somerset Maugham – Creatures of Circumstance (short stories)
  • Oscar Micheaux – Masquerade, a Historical Novel
  • James A. Michener – Tales of the South Pacific
  • W. O. Mitchell – Who Has Seen the Wind?
  • Alberto Moravia – The Woman of Rome (La Romana)
  • Willard Motley – Knock On Any Door
  • Vladimir Nabokov – Bend Sinister
  • Cesare Pavese – Il compagno
  • Gerard Reve (as Simon van het Reve) – De Avonden (The Evenings)
  • Kenneth Roberts – Lydia Bailey
  • Michael Sadleir – Forlorn Sunset
  • Samuel Shellabarger – Prince of Foxes
  • Mickey Spillane – I, the Jury
  • John Steinbeck
  • The Pearl
  • The Wayward Bus
  • Rex Stout – Too Many Women
  • Phoebe Atwood Taylor (as Alice Tilton) – The Iron Clew
  • Philip Toynbee – Tea with Mrs Goodman
  • Boris Vian
  • Autumn in Peking (L'Automne à Pékin)
  • Froth on the Daydream (L'Écume des jours)
  • (as Vernon Sullivan) – The Dead All Have the Same Skin (Les Morts ont tous la même peau)
  • Evelyn Waugh
  • Scott-King's Modern Europe
  • Jack Williamson – With Folded Hands

    • Children and young people

  • Dora Birtles – Pioneer Shack
  • William Pène du Bois – The Twenty-One Balloons
  • Margaret Wise Brown – Goodnight Moon
  • Edgar Rice Burroughs – Tarzan and the Foreign Legion
  • Nan Chauncy – They Found a Cave
  • Rumer Godden – The Doll's House
  • Clare Hoskyns-Abrahall – Prelude (biography)
  • James Lennox Kerr (as Peter Dawlish) – Dauntless Finds Her Crew (first in the Dauntless series of at least eight books)
  • Betty MacDonald – Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle (first in a series of four books)
  • Walter de la Mare – Collected Stories for Children
  • Laurence Meynell (as A. Stephen Tring) – The Old Gang
  • Arthur Ransome – Great Northern?
  • Frank Richards – Billy Bunter of Greyfriars School
  • Charles Green Shaw – It Looked Like Spilt Milk

    • Drama

  • Jean Anouilh – Invitation to the Castle (L'Invitation au Château)
  • William Douglas-Home – The Chiltern Hundreds
  • Jean Genet – The Maids (Les Bonnes)
  • Arthur Miller – All My Sons
  • Ena Lamont Stewart – Men Should Weep
  • Tennessee Williams – A Streetcar Named Desire

    • Poetry

  • Kingsley Amis – Bright November
  • Cairo poets, edited by Keith Bullen and John Cromer – Salamander: A Miscellany of Poetry
  • Aimé Césaire – Cahier d'un retour au pays natal ("Notebook of a Return to the Native Land"; expanded edition in book format)
  • August Derleth, editor – Dark of the Moon: Poems of Fantasy and the Macabre
  • Abba Kovner – Ad Lo-Or (Until No-Light)
  • Philip Larkin – A Girl in Winter
  • Louis MacNeice – The Dark Tower
  • Shinoe Shōda – Sange

    • Non-fiction

  • Cleanth Brooks – The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry
  • Simone de Beauvoir – The Ethics of Ambiguity (Pour une Morale de l'ambiguïté)
  • L. Sprague de Camp – The Evolution of Naval Weapons
  • Bernard DeVoto – Across the Wide Missouri
  • Benjamin Fondane (posthumous) – Baudelaire et l'expérience du gouffre
  • Anne Frank – The Diary of a Young Girl
  • George Gamow – One Two Three... Infinity
  • Primo Levi – If This Is a Man (Se questo è un uomo)
  • Walter Lippmann – The Cold War
  • George Orwell – Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool
  • Samuel Putnam – Paris Was Our Mistress: Memoirs of a Lost & Found Generation
  • A. L. Zissu – Nu există cult mozaic

    • Births

  • January 14 – Richard Laymon, American suspense novelist
  • February 3 – Paul Auster, American novelist
  • February 9 – Eamon Duffy, Irish church historian and academic
  • April 3 – Srikrishna Alanahalli, Indian novelist and poet (died 1989)
  • April 18 – Kathy Acker (Karen Lehmann), American novelist and poet (died 1997)
  • April 12 – Tom Clancy, American novelist (died 2013)
  • April 24 – Astrid Roemer, Suriname-born Dutch novelist, poet and playwright
  • April 28 – Humayun Azad, Bangladeshi author, poet, scholar and linguist (died 2004)
  • May 10 – Thomas Tessier, American writer of horror novels and short stories
  • May 12 – Catherine Yronwode, American author and illustrator
  • May 27 – Felix Dennis, English publisher and poet (died 2014)
  • June 5 – David Hare, English playwright
  • June 19 – Salman Rushdie, Indian novelist writing in English
  • June 22 – Octavia E. Butler, American science fiction writer (died 2006)
  • July 2 – Jürg Amann, Swiss dramatist
  • July 18 – Dermot Healy, Irish novelist and poet (died 2014)
  • August 23 – Willy Russell, English dramatist
  • September 8 – Marianne Wiggins, American novelist
  • September 21 – Stephen King, American novelist
  • October 19 – Giorgio Cavazzano, Italian comics artist and illustrator
  • November 6 – Michelle Magorian, English children's author
  • December 26 – Jean Echenoz, French novelist
  • Unknown dates
  • Jaume Cabré, Catalan Spanish novelist and screenwriter
  • Shahid Nadeem, Pakistani playwright
  • Borka Pavićević, Montenegrin dramaturge and columnist

    • Deaths

  • February 1 – J. D. Beresford, English short-story writer (born 1873)
  • February 5 – Hans Fallada, German novelist (born 1893)
  • February 11 – E. M. Hull, English romance novelist (born 1880)
  • February 15 – Margaret Marshall Saunders, Canadian author (born 1861)
  • March 12 – Winston Churchill, American novelist (born 1871)
  • March 13 – Angela Brazil, English school-story writer for girls (born 1868)
  • April 24 – Willa Cather, American novelist (born 1873)
  • April 30 – Anna Wickham (Edith Alice Mary Harper), English poet (suicide, born 1883)
  • May 21
  • Flora Thompson, English semi-autobiographical novelist (born 1876)
  • E. C. Vivian (Charles Henry Cannell), English genre novelist (born 1882)
  • June 6 – James Agate, English author and critic (born 1877)
  • June 17 – Maxwell Perkins, American literary editor (born 1884)
  • August 5 – Herbert Asquith, English poet and novelist (born 1881)
  • September 25 – Afevork Ghevre Jesus, Ethiopian author writing in Amharic (born 1868)
  • September 26 – Hugh Lofting, English-born children's writer (born 1886)
  • September 15 – Richard Le Gallienne, English writer and poet (born 1866)
  • October 13
  • William Le Queux, English-born French novelist and writer (born 1864)
  • Sidney Webb, English political economist (born 1859)
  • November 12 – Baroness Orczy (Emma Orczy), Hungarian novelist writing in English (born 1865)
  • November 14 – Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes, Anglo-French novelist and biographer writing in English (born 1868)
  • December 7 – Tristan Bernard, French playwright and novelist (born 1866)
  • December 15 – Arthur Machen, Welsh journalist, novelist and short-story writer (born 1863)
  • December 30 – Alfred North Whitehead, English mathematician and philosopher (born 1861)

    • Awards

  • Carnegie Medal for children's literature: Walter de la Mare, Collected Stories for Children
  • Frost Medal: Gustav Davidson
  • James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: L. P. Hartley, Eustace and Hilda
  • James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: Rev. C. C. E. Raven, English Naturalists from Neckham to Ray
  • Knight Bachelor: Ralph Richardson
  • Newbery Medal for children's literature: Carolyn Sherwin Bailey, Miss Hickory
  • Nobel Prize for literature: André Gide
  • Premio Nadal: Miguel Delibes, La sombra del ciprés es alargada
  • Pulitzer Prize for Drama: no award given
  • Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Robert Lowell: Lord Weary's Castle
  • Pulitzer Prize for the Novel: Robert Penn Warren – All the King's Men

    • References

    1947 in literature Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA


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