1932 - Literature

Literature

Nonfiction: Moral Man and Immoral Society by Missouri-born theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, 40, who says that Christianity's "gospel of love" cannot deal with real and active problems such as political coercion, that ambition and love of self taint mankind's greatest achievements and that the true character of people and nations makes it essential that they embrace doctrines of sin and repentence; Toward the Understanding of Karl Marx: A Revolutionary Interpretation by New York University philosopher, socialist, and self-described "secular humanist" Sidney Hook, 30; Farewell to Reform: Being a History of the Rise, Life, and Decay of the Progressive Mind in America by New Haven, Conn.-born New York Times Book Review editor John (Rensselaer) Chamberlain, 28; The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers by Carl L. Becker; New Bearings in English Poetry by Cambridge University literary critic F. R. (Frank Raymond) Leavis, 37, who attacks late Victorian poetry and champions the work of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and the late Gerard Manley Hopkins; The Roman Way by Edith Hamilton; Liberalism in the South by Virginia author Virginius Dabney, 31; Death in the Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway indulges the novelist's obsession with bullfighting; Afternoons in Utopia: Tales of the New Times by Stephen Leacock; Life Begins at Forty by Michigan-born Columbia University psychologist and journalism professor Walter B. (Boughton) Pitkin, 54; Fun in Bed: The Convalescent's Handbook by New York-born author Frank Scully, 40 (editor).

Biographer Lytton Strachey dies of stomach cancer at Ham Spray House, near Hungerford, Berkshire, January 21 at age 51; historian Frederick Jackson Turner at Pasadena, Calif., March 14 at age 70.

Fiction: Laughter in the Dark by Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov, 33; Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, who projects a world in the "Year of Our Ford" when people will go not to the movies but rather to the "feelies," where men will be attended by "pneumatic" girls (a word borrowed from T. S. Eliot's poem "Whispers of Immortality") and the state will control human reproduction; Radetzky March (Radetzkymarsch) by Joseph Roth; Journey to the End of the Night (Voyage au bout de la nuit) by French physician-novelist Louis Ferdinand Céline (Henri-Louis Destouches), 38; Little Man, What Now? (Kleiner Mann—was nun?) by German novelist Hans Fallada (Rudolf Ditzen), 30; The Memorial by Christopher Isherwood; Snooty Baronet by Wyndham Lewis; Midsummer Night's Madness and Other Stories by Irish writer Sean O'Faolain (originally John Francis Whelan), 32, who changed his name after the British repression of the 1916 Easter Rebellion, studied Gaelic, and has been teaching in America and Britain; Black Mischief by Evelyn Waugh; Poor Toni by Scottish novelist-poet-critic Edwin Muir, 45; Limits and Renewals (stories) by Rudyard Kipling; The Killing Bottle (stories) by L. P. Hartley; Light in August by William Faulkner; Tobacco Road by Georgia-born novelist Erskine Caldwell, 28, who depicts the depravity of poor whites in Georgia's sharecropper society; Save Me the Waltz by Alabama-born writer Zelda Fitzgerald (née Sayre), 32, who married novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1920 and has written many of the stories published under his name; The Wise and Foolish Virgins by English novelist Marguerite Steen, 38; Slow Dawning by Australian novelist Eleanor Dark (née O'Reilly), 31, who completed it in 1923; The Case of the Velvet Claws by English-born U.S. lawyer-novelist Erle Stanley Gardner, 43, who started writing occasional detective stories in 1921, has been averaging more than a million words of pulp magazine writing each year since 1928, and will follow his Perry Mason mystery novel with dozens in the same vein; Have His Carcase by Dorothy L. Sayers; Death Under Sail by English physicist-novelist C. P. (Charles Percy) Snow, 27; The Crime of Inspector Maigret by Franco-Belgian novelist Georges Simenon, 29, who got his first job as a reporter at age 16 and by age 28 had had nearly 200 of his pulp novels published under at least 17 noms de plume. In the next half century he will grind out 192 more under his own name, sometimes dashing off one per week.

Poetry: "Anna Livia Plurabelle" by James Joyce, whose daughter Lucia is troubled by mental illness that will be diagnosed as schizophrenia; Poems by Stephen Spender; Poem of Frozen Time (Poemat o czasie zastyglym) by Lithuanian-born Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, 21, who has become a socialist and a leader of the Catastrophist group of poets who predict an impending worldwide disaster; The Dream Keeper and Scottsboro Limited by Langston Hughes, who will be called the "Poet Laureate of Harlem."

Poet Dino Campana dies March 1 at age 46 in the mental institution at Florence, Italy, to which he has been confined since January 1918; Hart Crane jumps or falls from a ship bound for the United States from Mexico and drowns April 27 at age 32.

Juvenile: Little House in the Big Woods by Mansfield, Mo., author Laura Ingalls Wilder, 65, who moved to the Ozarks in 1894, wrote columns for the weekly Missouri Ruralist, and begins a series of eight volumes, written with help from her daughter Rose Wilder Lane, that will appear in the next 11 years to recount her girlhood in the Midwest of the late 19th century. Her parents settled in a shanty at De Smet, South Dakota, in 1880; she was married at age 18 to Almanzo J. Wilder, helped him run a farm near her parents' house, suffered through crop-destroying hailstorms and droughts, nearly died when both came down with diphtheria, and helped nurse her husband after he was partially paralyzed by a stroke; L'Histoire de Babar (The Story of Babar, the Little Elephant) by French artist-writer Jean de Brunhoff, 33, whose book will sell 50,000 copies in French before being translated into English. De Brunhoff will die of tuberculosis in 1937, but his book and its sequel Travels of Babar will be followed by further Babar adventures produced by his son.

Kenneth Grahame of 1908 Wind in the Willows fame dies at Pangbourne, Berkshire, July 6 at age 73. His book was dramatized 2 years ago by A. A. Milne, whose Toad of Toad Hall will entertain generations of children each Christmas.