1933 - Literature

Literature

Kirkus Reviews has its beginnings in January as former Harper and Bros. children's book department head Virginia Kirkus, 38, sends out review bulletins to 10 subscribing booksellers who pay $10 per month for her Bookshop Service. Harper's discontinued its children's department last year and gave the Meadville, Pa.-born Kirkus 6 months to look for a new job; she visited her family in Europe (her clergyman father had been assigned to the American Church at Munich), and on the return voyage she decided to start the New York-based service for which she changes her fee schedule in April, charging the smallest book stores $2.50, the largest $15; by year's end she has reviewed nearly 1,000 books, will expand her customer-base to libraries in 1935, will have more than 1,500 subscribers by 1950, and by the mid-1950s will be charging libraries $19 to $32 per month as publishers supply her with galley proofs and she adds book clubs, literary agents, radio stations, and even publishers to her subscriber list.

Nazis stage a May 10 torchlight parade in Berlin's Obernplatz with a speech by Adolf Hitler's minister of popular enlightenment and propaganda Joseph Goebbels to a crowd of about 40,000. The parade ends with students burning about 25,000 "subversive" books looted from libraries and bookstores across the country; destroyed in the pyre are "un-German" works not only by Jewish and Marxist authors such as Sholem Asch, Albert Einstein, Lion Feuchtwanger, Sigmund Freud, and Karl Marx but also by writers such as Franz Boaz, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Helen Keller, Sinclair Lewis (who says it should be considered a "tribute"), Jack London, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Erich Maria Remarque, Margaret Sanger, Upton Sinclair, and Franz Werfel.

Nonfiction: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein, whose book is actually her own autobiography rather than that of the woman who has been her companion and secretary since 1907. "Rose is a rose is a rose," writes Stein, who is famous for being more concerned with the sound and rhythm of words than with intelligibility; Down and Out in Paris and London by English writer George Orwell (originally Eric Blair), 30, whose health was broken by the climate while serving in the Burma Imperial Police and who has experienced poverty as a struggling writer; English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century by Connecticut-born Harvard historian (Clarence) Crane Brinton, 35; Orthodoxy in Massachusetts by Chicago-born historian Perry (Gilbert Eddy) Miller, 28; Life in Lesu by Philadelphia-born anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker, 32, examines life in a tiny village on the southwest Pacific island of New Ireland. Having studied under Bronislaw Malinowski at the London School of Economics, Powdermaker wins funding from the Social Science Research Council to study the community of Indianola, Miss. (see 1939); Baghdad Sketches by British travel writer Freya (Madeline) Stark, 40, who has become fluent in Arabic and Turkish and will go on to master other languages and dialects; Congo Solo: Misadventures Two Degrees North by Emily Hahn, who has worked with the Red Cross in the Belgian Congo.

Philosopher George Herbert Palmer dies at Cambridge, Mass., May 7 at age 91; philosopher Irving Babbitt at Cambridge, Mass., July 15 at age 67; lexicographer H. W. Fowler at Hinton St. George, Somerset, December 26 at age 75.

Fiction: Man's Fate (La Condition Humaine) by French novelist André Malraux, 32, deals with the undercover struggle against imperialism in Indochina; Saint Manuel the Good, Martyr (San Manuel Bueno, martír) by Miguel de Unamuno; The Tales of Jacob (Die Geschichten Jaacobs) by Thomas Mann; The Hangman (Bödeln) by Pär Lagerkvist; The Bark Tree (Le Chiendent) by French novelist Raymond Queneau, 30; La Chatte by Colette; Barnabo of the Mountains (Barnabo delle montagne) by Italian journalist-novelist Dino Buzzati, 26; Fontamara by Italian novelist Ignazio Silone (originally Secondo Tranquili), 33, whose anti-Fascist work exposes the plight of Italy's southern peasants (the author helped to found the Italian Communist Party in 1922, settled in Switzerland 3 years ago, and will soon become disillusioned with communism); The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (Die vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh) by Austrian poet-novelist Franz (Viktor) Werfel, 43; All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst's by English novelist Hugh Edwards, 35; Water on the Brain by Compton Mackenzie, whose satire attacks the British secret service for having prosecuted him last year in connection with alleged violation of the 1911 Official Secrets Act; Opening Day by English novelist David Gascoyne, 17; A Glastonbury Romance by John Cowper Powys; A Nest of Simple Folk by Sean O'Faolain; Lost Horizon by English novelist James Hilton, 33, who fascinates readers with a fictional Shangri-la in the Himalayas of Tibet; Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West, whose advice-to-the-lovelorn newspaper columnist becomes involved with some of his correspondents; God's Little Acre by Erskine Caldwell; The Last Adam by James Gould Cozzens; Rebecca by English novelist Daphne du Maurier, 26, a granddaughter of the late novelist and Punch caricaturist George du Maurier; Frost in May by English journalist-novelist Antonia White (née Botting), 34; Cold Comfort Farm by English novelist Stella Dorothea Gibbons, 31, satirizes rural melodramas; Daffy Boy (Doidinho) by José Lins do Rego; The Fault of Angels by Buffalo, N.Y.-born novelist Paul Horgan, 30, who was raised in New Mexico; Imitation of Life by Fannie Hurst; Let the Hurricane Roar by South Dakota-born novelist Rose Wilder Lane, 46; The Frontenac Mystery (Le Mystère Frontenac) by François Mauriac; Hag's Nook by Pennsylvania-born mystery novelist John Dickson Carr, 27; Murder Must Advertise: A Detective Story and Hangman's Holiday by Dorothy L. Sayers; Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back by H. C. McNeile.

Novelist George Moore dies at London January 21 at age 80; mystery writer Earl Derr Biggers suffers a heart attack in March at Palm Springs and dies at Pasadena, Calif., April 5 at age 48; Sir Anthony Hope dies at Walton-on-the-Hill, Surrey, July 8 at age 70; Publishers Weekly editor-publisher Richard R. Bowker at Stockbridge, Mass., November 12 at age 85.

James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses is acceptable for publication in the United States, rules Justice John M. Woolsey of the U.S. District Court at New York December 6 (United States v. One Book Called "Ulysses"). Customs officials at New York seized a copy of the book last year as it was being sent to Random House, the press has raised an outcry, and Judge Woolsey decides that the "dirty" words in the 11-year-old book "are old Saxon works known to almost all men and, I venture, to many women, and are such words as would be naturally and habitually used, I believe, by the types of folk whose life, physical and mental, Joyce is seeking to describe." They are, in short, appropriate in context and not gratuitous, says Woolsey. The federal government will lose on appeal in August of next year, and Random House will then publish the first authorized U.S. edition. British authorities will legalize it in 1936, but U.S. Post Office authorities continue to seize copies of the 1928 D. H. Lawrence novel Lady Chatterley's Lover (see 1959).

Poetry: Residence on Earth (Residencia en la tierra) by Pablo Neruda, who has published the work in individual pieces between 1925 and 1931 during a period of spiritual nihilism; The Winding Stair by William Butler Yeats; Mount Zion by London-born poet John Betjeman, 27; Now With His Love by John Peale Bishop.

Poet Sara Teasdale dies of a sleeping-pill overdose at New York January 28 at age 48; Greek poet C. P. Cavafy at his native Alexandria, Egypt, April 29 at age 70; Anna, comtesse de Noailles, at her native Paris April 30 at age 56.