1928 | Literature
Literature
Oxford's Clarendon Press publishes the 10th and final volume of A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles April 19 after 44 years of work, most of it by its late editor-in-chief, James A. H. Murray, who died in 1915 (see 1884). A 12-volume edition with a one-volume supplement will appear in 1933 under the title The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), a two-volume Compact Edition of the 15,487-page work will be marketed with magnifying glass in 1971, and it will be further supplemented in 1972 and thereafter to provide authoritative information on English word origins, usages, and pronunciations (see 1989).
The Recordak system introduced by Eastman Kodak Co. permits copying of pictures and/or text on narrow rolls of film (microfilm) using continuous, automatic cameras that record documents (initially bank checks in transit) in greatly reduced size on 16-millimeter film. The process will soon be used to copy papers in business, education, and government, with 35-millmeter film used in addition to 16-millimeter, enabling libraries, government agencies, and commercial institutions to store huge amounts of information without paper (which is more subject to deterioration) and at great savings in space.
Nonfiction: Origins of the World War (two volumes) by historian Sidney B. Fay, who questions the widely-held belief that Germany was solely responsible for starting the Great War; Der logische Aufbau der Welt by German-born Viennese philosopher Rudolf Carnap, 37, whose work lays the basis of logical empiricism, dismissing most traditional metaphysics as a source of meaningless answers to nonexistent problems; American Negro: A Study in Racial Crossings by Ohio-born Northwestern University anthropology professor Melville (Jean) Herskovits, 33, advances the thesis that U.S. blacks constitute a homogeneous and culturally definable population group; Negro Makers of History and African Myths, Together with Proverbs by Carter G. Woodson, who 2 years ago established Negro History Week (later Black History Month, it will be observed in America every February); Coming of Age in Samoa by American Museum of Natural History anthropologist Margaret Mead, 26, is based on studies made while living with the natives. Mead's book on the development of social behavior among adolescents on the Pacific island stresses the impermanence of human values, but she has not learned the language and it will turn out that much of her information has been derived from what she heard from teenagers who told her what they thought she wanted to hear; Science and Ethics by English-born Indian geneticist J. B. S. (John Burdon Sanderson) Haldane, 36; The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels) by Berlin critic Walter Benjamin, now 36, who wrote the work as a doctoral thesis, only to have it rejected by the University of Frankfurt; The Tide of Fortune (Sternstunden der Menschheit) by Stefan Zweig, whose five historical portraits in miniature gain him popularity for the first time; The Aims of Education by Alfred North Whitehead; The New Russia by New York-born journalist Dorothy Thompson, 34, who marries novelist Sinclair Lewis; The Hunger Fighters by Paul de Kruif; Elizabeth and Essex by Lytton Strachey; The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism by George Bernard Shaw; English Humour by J. B. Priestley; Radiant Motherhood and Enduring Passion by Marie Stopes.
Fiction: Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence, who is dying of tuberculosis at Florence. His explicit account of the sexual relations between the wife of a crippled English peer and their lusty gamekeeper Mellors is privately printed in Italy because it has been denied publication in England (see 1959); The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall, who calls herself "John" and whose novel about a lesbian attachment between a young girl and an older woman encounters censorship problems (the book is said to have no literary merit and is banned, despite testimonials from E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf); Orlando by Virginia Woolf; The Last Post by Ford Madox Ford; The Children by Edith Wharton; All the Conspirators by English novelist Christopher Isherwood, 24; Nadja by surrealist André Breton; Southern Mail (Courrier-Sud) by French aviator-novelist Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 28; The Cockpit by Chicago-born novelist James Gould Cozzens, 25; Mr. Buttsworthy on Rampole Island by H. G. Wells; Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley; A Modern Comedy by John Galsworthy; The Childermass by Wyndham Lewis; Some Prefer Nettles (Tade kuu muhi) by Junichiro Tanizaki; Time Regained (Le Temps Retrouvé) by the late Marcel Proust is the last of his Remembrance of Things Past novels; Decline and Fall by English novelist Evelyn (Arthur St. John) Waugh, 25; Poor Women (stories) by Irish writer Norah Hoult, 30; The Shunned House by Providence, R.I.-born novelist H. P. (Howard Phillips) Lovecraft, 38, whose horror stories have been appearing in the magazine Weird Tales since 1916; She Walks in Beauty by Ohio-born New York novelist Dawn Powell, 30; Home to Harlem by Claude McKay; Nothing Is Sacred by Sioux City-born novelist Josephine Herbst, 36, who came to New York late in 1919 and early in 1920 began an adulterous affair with playwright Maxwell Anderson, then an editorial writer for the New York Globe (his wife will die in 1931, and he will marry two other women, but not Josie Herbst); My First Two Thousand Years: The Autobiography of the Wandering Jew by Munich-born U.S. poet-novelist George Sylvester Viereck, 43, and Philadelphia-born New York Romance languages teacher Paul Eldridge, 40, who create a controversy by seeming to endorse free love; The Single Standard by Los Angeles-born former Hearst newspaper reporter Adela Rogers St. Johns, 34; Meet the Tiger by Singapore-born British novelist Leslie Charteris (Leslie Charles Bowyer Yin), 21, whose debonair outlaw hero Simon Templar ("the Saint") will appear in many sequels; The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie.
Novelist Thomas Hardy dies at his home near Dorchester January 11 at age 87; Vicente Blasco Ibáñez at Menton, France, January 28 on the eve of his 61st birthday; Italo Svevo (Aron Hector Schmitz) of heart disease at Motta di Livenza September 13 at age 66 following an automobile accident in which he broke a femur; George Barr McCutcheon dies suddenly October 23 at age 52 while attending a luncheon of the Dutch Treat Club at New York's Hotel Martinique, having published some 40 works of fiction.
Poetry: The Tower by William Butler Yeats; The Testament of Beauty by Poet Laureate Robert Seymour Bridges, now 84; To My Mother by Siegfried Sassoon; Gypsy Ballads (Romancers guano) by Federico García Lorca, whose imaginary gypsies are based only in part on the real gypsies of Andalusia; Nine Experiments by English poet Stephen Spender, 19; John Brown's Body by Stephen Vincent Benét; Mr. Pope and Other Poems by Kentucky-born poet Allen Tate, 28; The Seventh Hill by Robert Hillyer; The Cantos (II) by Ezra Pound; Buck in the Snow by Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Poet Eleanor Wylie suffers a stroke in England and dies at New York December 16 at age 43.
Juvenile: The House at Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne; Millions of Cats by New Ulm, Minn.-born author-illustrator Wanda (Hazel) Gág, 35; Kewpies and the Runaway Baby by Rose Cecil O'Neill; A Moon for Witches by Westborough, Mass.-born author Esther Forbes, 37.