1940 - Literature

Literature

Nonfiction: To the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson; Not by Arms Alone: Essays on Our Time and The World Must Federate: Isolation versus Cooperation by Hans Kohn; Radio and the Printed Page: An Introduction to the Study of Radio and Its Role in the Communication of Ideas by Vienna-born Columbia University sociologist Paul F. (Felix) Lazarsfeld, 39, who has directed the Office of Radio Research at Princeton since 1937 and next year will head a newly-created Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia; The Origins of Ismailism: A Study of the Historical Background of the Fatimid Caliphate by London-born Middle Eastern scholar Bernard Lewis, 24, whose doctoral thesis is published to great acclaim; A Winter in Arabia by Freya Stark: Race, Language, and Culture by Franz Boas, now 82, crowns a long career in anthropology; Why Men Behave Like Apes and Vice Versa by Earnest A. Hooton.

Paris bookseller Sylvia Beach moves her Shakespeare & Co. collection to the fourth floor of her building to keep the books out of the hands of German occupation forces.

Historian Herbert Albert Laurens Fisher dies at his native London April 18 at age 75; literary critic Walter Benjamin at Port-Bou, Spain, September 26 at age 48 after hearing an erroneous report from the police chief of the Franco-Spanish border town that Jews are to be turned over to the Gestapo (he is found dead of a morphine overdose and it is assumed that he committed suicide, although it will later be suggested that he was killed by order of Josef Stalin); journalist-author Katherine Mayo dies at Bedford, Pa., October 9 at age 73.

Fiction: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Georgia-born novelist Carson Smith McCullers, 23; The Ox-Bow Incident by Maine-born Nevada novelist Walter van Tilburg Clark, 31; For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway; You Can't Go Home Again by the late Thomas Wolfe; The Hamlet by William Faulkner; Native Son by Natchez-born novelist Richard Wright, 31, who moved to New York in 1937 to edit the Daily Worker. His book has sales of 215,000 copies within 3 weeks, making Wright the first black best-selling author in U.S. history; My Name Is Aram (stories) by William Saroyan; The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene; Strangers and Brothers by C. P. Snow, who serves as chief of scientific personnel for the ministry of labor; Holland's Glory (Hollands Glorie) by Dutch novelist Jan de Hartog, 26, is about oceangoing tugboats (the author ran away to sea at age 10) but becomes a symbol of the Dutch resistance, will have sales of 500,000 copies in the Netherlands, and will be banned in 1942; Kallocaine by Karin Boye describes an unbearably oppressive totalitarian regime of the future; The Pool of Vishnu by L. H. Myers; The Bright Pavilions by Hugh Walpole; Owen Glendower by John Cowper Powys; The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead; The Thibaults (eighth of eight volumes) by Roger Martin du Gard; On a Darkling Plain by Wallace Stegner, who teaches English at Harvard; Come Back to Erin by Sean O'Faolain; But Who Wakes the Bugler? by Chicago-born Poetry magazine associate editor Peter De Vries, 30; Angels on Toast by Dawn Powell; 30; The Cross-Eyed Bear by Kansas City-born mystery writer Dorothy B. (Belle) Hughes (née Flanagan), 35; Journey into Fear by Eric Ambler; Ten Little Niggers by Agatha Christie, whose new detective novel will be published in America first as And Then There Were None, later as Ten Little Indians; Last Train Out by E. Phillips Oppenheim, now 73, who gave up his villa on the Riviera when war threatened and resettled on the island of Guernsey.

Novelist E. F. Benson dies at London February 29 at age 72, having written nearly 100 books, includng biographies; author Hamlin Garland dies at Hollywood, Calif., March 4 at age 79; Mikhail Bulgakov at Moscow March 10 at age 48, having been ostracized since 1930 but denied permission to emigrate by Josef Stalin, whom he obliquely attacked in his writing; DuBose Heyward dies at Tryon, N.C., June 16 at age 54; F. Scott Fitzgerald of a heart attack at Hollywood, Calif., December 21 at age 44; Nathanael West is killed in an automobile accident near El Centro, Calif., December 22, at age 37 along with his wife, Eileen (née McKinney), whom he married in April.

Poetry: East Coker by T. S. Eliot; "The Hours" by John Peale Bishop is an elegy for his late friend F. Scott Fitzgerald; The Man Coming Toward You by Brooklyn, N.Y.-born poet Oscar Williams, 40; In What Hour by South Bend, Ind.-born California avant-garde poet-painter Kenneth Rexroth, 34; Collected Poems by Kenneth Fearing; Spain, Take Thou This Cup from Me (España, aparta de me este caliz) by the late César Vallejo; Clothed in Light (Svetlena odená) by Jaroslav Seifert; Orientations (Prosanatolismoi) by Greek poet Odysseus Elytis (Odysseus Alepoudhelis), 28; Cantos by Ezra Pound; . . . The White Cliffs by Alice Duer Miller, whose love story in verse set in wartime Britain will have sales of 700,000 copies by 1945 and twice be read on radio by actress Lynn Fontanne.

Poet Edwin Markham dies on Staten Island, N.Y., March 7 at age 87; William Henry Davies at Nailsworth, Gloucestershire, September 26 at age 69.

Juvenile: Horton Hatches the Egg by Dr. Seuss; Pat the Bunny by New York-born author-illustrator Dorothy Kunhardt (née Meserve), 39, who has a felt rabbit and other tactile objects affixed to her pages; The Kid from Tomkinsville and Champion's Choice by John R. Tunis.