1938 - Literature

Literature

Nonfiction: Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell antagonizes British leftists by showing how Stalinists have suppressed Trotskyist and anarchist elements in Spain's independent left. Orwell joined the Republican side after going to Spain as a journalist late in 1936. He was shot through the throat but survived; a left-wing publisher has rejected his manuscript; it will sell only 600 copies in his lifetime, and will not be published in the United States until after his death in 1950; It Is Later Than You Think by Russian-born New York critic Max Lerner, 36; The Anatomy of Revolution by Crane Brinton; Behavior of Organisms by Pennsylvania-born Harvard behavioral psychologist B. F. (Burrhus Frederic) Skinner, 34, will survive as a landmark in its field; Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen; Guide to the Philosophy of Morals and Politics by C. E. M. Joad; The Intelligent Individual and Society by physicist Percy W. Bridgman, who will create a stir next year by announcing that his Harvard laboratory will no longer be open to visitors representing nations controlled by totalitarian regimes; Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel by Arkansas-born historian C. (Comer) Vann Woodward, 29; Alone by polar explorer Richard E. Byrd; The Passing of the Aborigines by Daisy Bates, now 74, is a bestseller in Europe (no Australian edition will appear until 1946), and one critic hails its author as "an entirely heroic woman," combining the qualities of "Father Damien, Florence Nightingale, Miss Edna May Oliver, Miss Cicely Courtneidge, and Dickens's Mrs. Jellyby" (see human rights, 1912); China Fights Back: An American Woman with the 8th Route Army by Missouri-born journalist Agnes Smedley, 46, who went to China 10 years ago and has dedicated herself to the Chinese revolutionary cause; With Malice Toward Some by Yonkers, N.Y.-born writer Margaret Halsey, 28, whose comments on the eccentricities of some British customs are based on observations made during a year in Devon, England, where her husband was an exchange professor.

Philosopher-poet Sir Muhammad Iqbal dies at Lahore April 21 at age 60, having worked for years to encourage the establishment of a separate Muslim state (see politics, 1940). He is buried in front of the city's great Badshahi Mosque; Edmund Husserl dies at Freiburg im Breisgau April 27 at age 79, having founded the philosophical method known as phenomenology.

Fiction: Nausea (La Nausée) by French novelist Jean-Paul Sartre, 33; But the World Must Be Young (Men ung ma verden ennu vaere) by Nordahl Grieg is a novelistic critique of Stalinism; The Capuchin Tomb (Die Kapuzinergruft) by Joseph Roth, who left his native Germany for Paris in 1933; Beware of Pity (Ungeduld des Herzens) by Stefan Zweig, who was driven into exile by the Nazis in 1934 and will move to Brazil in 1940; The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen; Brighton Rock by Graham Greene is his first explicitly "Catholic" novel; Scoop by Evelyn Waugh is a spoof on British foreign correspondents that caricatures Maxwell Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, and thinly veils actual fact; Tropisms (Tropismes) by Russian-born French novelist Nathalie (née Tcherniak) Sarraute, 36; Out of the Silent Planet by English novelist C. S. (Clive Staples) Lewis, 40; Count Belisarius by Robert Graves; You Make Your Own Life (stories) by English writer V. S. (Victor Sawden) Pritchett, 37; The Professor by English novelist-poet-Greek scholar Rex (Ernest) Warner, 33; Over the Frontier by Stevie Smith, who employs the same autographical monologue style that made her 1934 novel a success; The Lady and the Unicorn by English novelist Rumer Godden, 30; The Happy Island by Dawn Powell; "The Great American Novel" by Clyde Brion Davis; The Single Hound by Belgian-born U.S. poet-novelist May (née Eléanor Marie) Sarton, 26, whose father is the science historian George Sarton; Chosen People by Seaforth Mackenzie; The Code of the Woosters by P. G. Wodehouse; Dynasty of Death by Manchester, England-born novelist (Janet Miriam) Taylor Caldwell (née Holland), 38, who 7 years ago obtained her bachelor's degree at the University of Buffalo, studying nights while working as a court stenographer by day; Young Man with a Horn by Missoula, Mont.-born novelist Dorothy Dodds Baker, 31, has been inspired by the music, if not the life, of the late Bix Beiderbecke, who died in 1931 (see 1924); Epitaph for a Spy and Cause for Alarm by Eric Ambler; The Fashion in Shrouds by Margery Allingham.

Novelist Owen Wister dies of a cerebral hemorrhage at North Kingston, R.I., July 21 at age 78; Thomas Wolfe of tuberculosis at Baltimore September 15 at age 37.

Poetry: Switch Off the Lights (Zhasnete svetla) by Jaroslav Seifert, who has been depressed by the Munich agreement turning over most of his native Czechoslovakia to Germany; The Odyssey (I Odysseia) by Greek (Cretan) poet Nikos Kazantzakis, 55, whose 33,333-line "modern sequel" has been influenced by the French philosopher Henri Bergson, now 79; Fable of the World (La Fable du monde) by Jules Supervielle; In Dreams Begin Responsiblities by Brooklyn, N.Y.-born poet Delmore Schwartz, 25; Mediterranean and U.S. 1 by Muriel Rukeyser; Dead Reckoning by Kenneth Fearing; Mask and Trefoil (Mascarillo y trébol) by Alfonsina Storni.

Poet-soldier Gabriele D'Annunzio dies of a cerebral hemorrhage at his villa on Lake Garda March 1 at age 74, receives a state funeral, and is buried at his native Pescara; César Vallejo dies in poverty of tuberculosis, malaria, and an acute intestinal infection at Paris April 15 at age 46; Alfonsina Storni commits suicide at Mar del Plata, Argentina, October 25 at age 46 (she has had incurable cancer); Osip Mandelstam is rearrested by Soviet authorities and sent to Vtoraya Rechka outside Vladivistok, where he dies just after Christmas at age 47. He was first arrested in 1934 after saying of Josef Stalin, "After each death, he is like a Georgian tribesman, putting a raspberry in his mouth."

Juvenile: The Yearling by Washington, D.C.-born Florida author Marjorie Rawlings (née Kinnan), 42; The Iron Duke by Massachusetts-born New York Evening Post sportswriter John R. (Roberts) Tunis, 48; The Man of Bronze by former New York telegrapher Kenneth Robeson (Lester Dent), 32, whose "Doc Savage" adventure novel will be followed in the next 7 years by another 164 such novels as Dent turns out a new 60,000-word "Doc Savage" adventure almost every month; The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins by Dr. Seuss.

The Caldecott Medal established by R. R. Bowker Publishing Co. chairman Frederic G. Melcher will be presented each year at the conference of the American Library Association together with the Newbery Medal that Melcher established in 1922. Awarded "to the artist of the most distinguished American picture book for children," the award is named to commemorate the English illustrator and caricaturist Randolph Caldecott, who died in 1886.