1948 in literature

Events

January 6 – Poet Pablo Neruda speaks out in the Senate of Chile against political repression and is forced into hiding.

January 28 – A debate between Bertrand Russell and Frederick Copleston on the existence of God is broadcast by the BBC.

February 5 – A private assembly of 50 major literary and artistic figures listens to a recording of Antonin Artaud's play Pour en Finir avec le Jugement de dieu whose broadcast on French radio three days earlier has been prohibited.

May 4 – Release of Sir Laurence Olivier's film of Shakespeare's Hamlet, which will be the first British film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.

c. June 1 – The first volume of Winston Churchill's The Second World War (1948–1953) is published.

September 8 – Première of Terence Rattigan's one-act plays The Browning Version and Harlequinade at the Phoenix Theatre (London).

September 17 – The remains of Irish poet W. B. Yeats (who died at Menton, France in 1939) are re-buried at Drumcliffe, County Sligo, "Under bare Ben Bulben's head", having been moved from the original burial place, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, on Irish Naval Service corvette LÉ Macha. His grave at Drumcliffe, with an epitaph from "Under Ben Bulben", one of his final poems ("Cast a cold Eye / On Life, on Death. / Horseman, pass by"), becomes a place of literary pilgrimage.

November 13 – Alice's Adventures Under Ground, the original manuscript of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, having been purchased by a group of American Anglophiles in 1946, is presented by Luther H. Evans (Librarian of Congress) to the British Museum Library.

First performance of Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1944), a student production in English at Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota. This year also sees the première of Brecht's adaptation of Antigone, at the Chur Stadttheater in Switzerland with Helene Weigel in the title rôle.

London publisher Weidenfeld & Nicolson is founded by George Weidenfeld and Nigel Nicolson.

The Pulitzer Prize for the Novel is renamed the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

The Palatino serif typeface, designed by Hermann Zapf, is released by the Mergenthaler Linotype Company.

Fiction

Bertil Almqvist – Barna Hedenhös: bilder från stenåldern ("The Hedenhös family: pictures from the Stone Age")

Jerzy Andrzejewski – Ashes and Diamonds

René Barjavel – Le Diable l'emporte

Hervé Bazin – Vipère au Poing

Henry Bellamann – Parris Mitchell of King's Row

Elizabeth Bowen – The Heat of the Day

Jocelyn Brooke

The Military Orchid

The Scapegoat

Pearl S. Buck – Peony

Taylor Caldwell – Melissa

Truman Capote – Other Voices, Other Rooms

Al Capp – The Life and Times of the Shmoo

John Dickson Carr – The Skeleton in the Clock (as by Carter Dickson)

Adolfo Bioy Casares – The Celestial Plot (short stories)

Agatha Christie

Taken at the Flood

The Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories

The Rose and the Yew Tree (as by Mary Westmacott)

James Gould Cozzens – Guard of Honor

Edmund Crispin – Love Lies Bleeding

A. J. Cronin – Shannon's Way

Osamu Dazai – No Longer Human

L. Sprague de Camp – Divide and Rule

L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt – The Carnelian Cube

August Derleth – Not Long for this World

Lord Dunsany – The Fourth Book of Jorkens

Howard Fast – My Glorious Brothers

William Faulkner – Intruder in the Dust

Henry Green – Concluding

Graham Greene – The Heart of the Matter

Giovannino Guareschi – Mondo Piccolo: Don Camillo ("The Little World of Don Camillo")

Hella Haasse (anonymously) – Oeroeg

L.P. Hartley – The Travelling Grave and Other Stories

Marguerite Henry – King of the Wind

Georgette Heyer – The Foundling

Zora Neale Hurston – Seraph on the Suwanee

Aldous Huxley – Ape and Essence

Shirley Jackson – "The Lottery" & "Charles"

Tove Jansson – Trollkarlens hatt ("The Magician's Hat", translated as Finn Family Moomintroll)

Anna Kavan – The House of Sleep

Patrick Kavanagh – Tarry Flynn

Ross Lockridge, Jr. – Raintree County

Norman Mailer – The Naked and the Dead

Thomas Mann – Joseph and His Brothers

Leopoldo Marechal – Adam Buenosayres

W. Somerset Maugham – Catalina

C. L. Moore – The Mask of Circe

Zoe B. Oldenbourg – The World Is Not Enough

Alan Paton – Cry, the Beloved Country

Ellery Queen – Ten Days' Wonder

Seabury Quinn – Roads

Anya Seton – The Hearth and the Eagle

Irwin Shaw – The Young Lions

Nevil Shute – No Highway

B. F. Skinner – Walden Two

Clark Ashton Smith – Genius Loci and Other Tales

Dodie Smith – I Capture the Castle

William Gardner Smith – Last of the Conquerors

Rex Stout – And Be a Villain

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar – A Mind at Peace (Huzur, serial publication)

Gore Vidal – The City and the Pillar

Mika Waltari – The Adventurer (Mikael Karvajalka)

Donald Wandrei – The Web of Easter Island

Evelyn Waugh – The Loved One

Stanley G. Weinbaum – The Black Flame

Dorothy West – The Living is Easy

Thornton Wilder – The Ides of March

Herman Wouk – City Boy: The Adventures of Herbie Bookbinder

Children and young people

Antonia Forest – Autumn Term (first in the Marlow series of ten books)

Ruth Stiles Gannett – My Father's Dragon

Marguerite Henry – King of the Wind

Lorna Hill – Marjorie and Co. (first in the Marjorie series of six books)

Astrid Lindgren – Pippi in the South Seas

Dr. Seuss – Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose

Geoffrey Trease – The Hills of Varna (also as Shadow of the Hawk)

Elfrida Vipont – The Lark in the Moon

Drama

Bertolt Brecht – Antigone, The Caucasian Chalk Circle and Mr Puntila and his Man Matti (Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti, first performed)

Robertson Davies – Overlaid

Witold Gombrowicz – The Marriage (first published, in Spanish translation)

Terence Rattigan – The Browning Version and Harlequinade

Jean-Paul Sartre – Dirty Hands (Les Mains sales)

Kerala women's Malayalam collective – Thozhil Kendrathilekku ("To the Workplace!")

Poetry

Sukanta Bhattacharya (died 1947) – Chharpatra (ছাড়পত্র, "Certificate")

Olga Kirsch – Mure van die Hart

Derek Walcott – 25 Poems

Non-fiction

Isaac Asimov – The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline

Winston Churchill – The Gathering Storm (The Second World War, vol. 1)

T. S. Eliot – Notes Towards the Definition of Culture

Robert Graves – The White Goddess

Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey – Cheaper by the Dozen

Richard Hofstadter – The American Political Tradition

F. R. Leavis – The Great Tradition

Betty MacDonald – The Plague and I

Dumas Malone – Jefferson and His Time: Jefferson the Virginian

Thomas Merton – The Seven Storey Mountain

A. A. Milne – The Norman Church

Anthony Powell – John Aubrey and His Friends

John Steinbeck – A Russian Journal

Births

January 1 – Lynn Abbey (Marilyn Lorraine Abbey), American writer

January 2 – Joyce Wadler, American writer and memoirist

January 20 – Nigel Williams, English author, playwright and screenwriter

February 3 – Henning Mankell, Swedish crime novelist, children's author and dramatist (died 2015)

February 5 – Christopher Guest, English-American writer, actor and director

February 19 – Clive Sinclair, English short-story writer

February 28 – Mike Figgis, English writer, director and composer

February 29

Hermione Lee, English biographer

Patricia A. McKillip, American fantasy and science fiction novel author

March 4 – James Ellroy, American crime fiction author

March 17 – William Gibson, American-born speculative novelist

March 28 – Iman Budhi Santosa, Indonesian poet

April 4 – Patricia A. McKillip, American science fiction, horror and fantasy author

April 28 – Terry Pratchett, English comic fantasy author (died 2015)

May 31 – Svetlana Alexievich, Belarusian writer of literary reportage, Nobel Prize in Literature recipient

June 14 – Laurence Yep, American author

June 21 – Andrzej Sapkowski, Polish fantasy author

July 22 – Susan Eloise Hinton, American young-adult author

August 2 – Snoo Wilson, English playwright and screenwriter (died 2013)

August 8 – Miranda Seymour, English novelist and biographer

September 16 – Julia Donaldson, English author and children's writer

September 20 – George R. R. Martin (George Raymond Martin), American fantasy author

October 6 – Zakes Mda (Zanemvula Kizito Gatyeni Mda), South African novelist, poet and playwright

October 9 – Ciaran Carson, Northern Irish poet and novelist

October 17 – Robert Jordan (James Oliver Rigney, Jr), American fantasy author (died 2007)

Unknown dates

Ibrahim Al-Koni, Libyan novelist

Suzanne Robert, French Canadian novelist (died 2007)

Edward Rutherfurd (Francis Edward Wintle), English novelist

Deaths

March 6 – Ross Lockridge, Jr., American author (suicide, born 1914)

March 10 – Zelda Fitzgerald, American novelist (killed in fire, born 1900)

April 22 – Prosper Montagné, French chef and food author (born 1865)

May 5 – Sextil Pușcariu, Romanian linguist, philologist and journalist (heart failure, born 1877)

May 20 – Victor Ido, Dutch East Indian journalist, novelist and dramatist (born 1869)

May 22 – Claude McKay, Jamaican American writer (born 1889)

July 3 – Phelps Putnam, American poet (born 1894)

June 21 – Alice Brown, American novelist, poet and dramatist (born 1857)

July 5 – Georges Bernanos, French novelist (born 1888)

July 21 – J.-H. Rosny jeune (Séraphin Justin François Boex), French science fiction writer (born 1859)

July 27 – Susan Glaspell, American dramatist and novelist (born 1876)

August 3 – Venetia Stanley, English correspondent (cancer, born 1887)

August 19 – Frederick Philip Grove, German-born Canadian novelist and essayist (born 1879)

September 8 – Thomas Mofolo, Sotho novelist (born 1876)

September 9 – Lajos Bíró, Hungarian novelist, dramatist and screenwriter (born 1880)

October 12 – Alfred Kerr, German theatre critic (suicide, born 1867)

December 13 – Michael Roberts, English poet and critic (born 1902)

Awards

Carnegie Medal for children's literature: Richard Armstrong, Sea Change

James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter

James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: Percy A. Scholes, The Great Dr Burney

Newbery Medal for children's literature: William Pene du Bois, The Twenty-One Balloons

Nobel Prize for literature: Thomas Stearns Eliot

Premio Nadal: Sebastián Juan Arbó, Sobre las piedras grises

Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: James A. Michener – Tales of the South Pacific

Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: W. H. Auden: The Age of Anxiety