1940 in literature
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1940.
Events
- January – The English literary magazine Horizon first appears in London, with Cyril Connolly, Peter Watson and Stephen Spender contributing.
- February – The 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 – A movie adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice is released, 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 and The End of the Affair.
- *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. 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 in 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. On dawn patrol as a fighter pilot, Douglas Blackwood sees his family's publishing business, William Blackwood, burning.
- unknown dates
- *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 begins publishing Ladybird Books in the United Kingdom in a new format, 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
- Pierre Benoit – The Environs of Aden
- Karin Boye – Kallocain
- Douglas Brown and Christopher Serpell – Loss of Eden: a cautionary tale
- Heðin Brú – Feðgar á ferð
- Edgar Rice Burroughs – Synthetic Men of Mars
- Dino Buzzati – The Tartar Steppe
- 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
- *Murder in the Submarine Zone
- Adolfo Bioy Casares – The Invention of 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
- 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
- Arthur Koestler – Darkness at Noon
- Marie Belloc Lowndes – The Christine Diamond
- Carson McCullers – The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
- W. Somerset Maugham – The Mixture as Before
- 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
- C. P. Snow – George Passant
- 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
- Dylan Thomas – Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog
- Luis Trenker – Captain Ladurner
- Sachchidananda Vatsyayan –
- Richard Wright – Native Son
- Francis Brett Young – Mr. Lucton's Freedom
- Xiao Hong – Ma Bole''
Children and young people
- Enid Blyton – The Naughtiest Girl in the School
- Godfried Bomans – Eric in the Land of the Insects
- Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire – Abraham Lincoln
- Doris Gates – Blue Willow
- Dorothy Kunhardt – Pat the Bunny
- Phyllis Matthewman – Chloe Takes Control
- 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
- Bertolt Brecht – Mr Puntila and his Man Matti
- Agatha Christie – Peril at End House
- Jean Cocteau – Le Bel indifférent
- Artturi Järviluoma – Pohjalaisia
- Terence Rattigan and Anthony Goldsmith – Follow My Leader
- Lawrence Riley – Return Engagement
- George Shiels – The Rugged Path
- Vernon Sylvaine – Nap Hand
- John Van Druten –
- * Leave Her to Heaven
- * Old Acquaintance
- Emlyn Williams
- *The Corn Is Green
- *The Light of Heart
Non-fiction
- Mortimer J. Adler – How to Read a Book
- "Cato" – 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
- Karl Mannheim – Man and Society in the Age of Reconstruction
- 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, Chinese novelist
- January 15 – Ted Lewis, English novelist
- January 23 – Mario Levrero, Uruguayan novelist
- 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 6 - Homero Aridjis, Mexican poet, novelist and environmentalist
- 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
- May 1 – Bobbie Ann Mason, American novelist, short story writer, essayist and literary critic
- May 7 – Angela Carter, English novelist
- May 8 – Peter Benchley, American novelist
- May 13 – Bruce Chatwin, English novelist and travel writer
- May 24 – Joseph Brodsky, Russian-born American poet and essayist
- May 28 – Maeve Binchy, Irish novelist
- 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
- October 15 – Fanny Howe, American poet, novelist and short story writer
- October 20 – Robert Pinsky, American poet
- November 15 – René Avilés Fabila, Mexican writer
- November 20 – Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, American Indologist and translator
- December 5 – Peter Pohl, Swedish novelist
- December 29 – Brigitte Kronauer, German novelist
Deaths
- January 1 – Panuganti Lakshminarasimha Rao, Indian writer
- January 5 – Humbert Wolfe, British poet and epigrammist
- January 27 – Isaak Babel, Russian journalist and dramatist
- February 11 – John Buchan, Scottish novelist
- February 29 – E. F. Benson, English novelist, biographer, memoirist and short-story writer
- March 7 – Edwin Markham, American poet
- March 10 – Mikhail Bulgakov, Russian novelist and playwright
- March 12 – Florence White, English food writer
- *Selma Lagerlöf, Swedish children's writer and Nobel laureate
- April 13 – Mary Bathurst Deane, English novelist
- June 10 – Marcus Garvey, Jamaican journalist and publisher
- June 20 – Charley Chase, American screenwriter
- June 21 – Hendrik Marsman, Dutch poet
- August 4 – Ze'ev Jabotinsky, Russian-born Zionist leader, novelist and poet
- August 7 – T. O'Conor Sloane, American editor
- September 8 – Constantin Banu, Romanian politician, journalist, cultural promoter and aphorist
- September 26 – W. H. Davies, Welsh poet
- November 27 – Nicolae Iorga, Romanian historian, politician, culture critic, poet and playwright
- December 21 – F. Scott Fitzgerald, American novelist
- December 22 – Nathanael West, American screenwriter and satirist
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 in literature: not awarded
- Prix Goncourt: Francis Ambrière, Les grandes vacances
- 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