1941 - Literature

Literature

The Brooklyn Pubic Library's central branch opens in April on Grand Army Plaza. A second floor will open in 1955 and there will be further expansions in 1972 and 1989.

The Antioch Review begins publication in the spring at the 89-year-old Ohio college. The literary journal will continue into the 21st century.

Nonfiction: Escape from Freedom by German-born U.S. psychoanalyst and philosopher Erich Fromm, 41, examines the meaning of freedom and authority; Nietzsche by Crane Brinton; World Order in Historical Perspective by Hans Kohn, who leaves Smith College to accept a chair at City College of New York; Berlin Diary by Chicago-born journalist William L. (Lawrence) Shirer, 37, who worked as a CBS radio correspondent from 1937 until this year; The Fall of Paris (Padeniye Parizha) by Ilya Ehrenburg is a vehement attack on the West; Black Lamb and Gray Falcon by Rebecca West, now 49, is a two-volume diary of her 1937 trip to Yugoslavia, a country whose Serbian population is being massacred by Croatians with help from German invasion forces; Twelve Who Ruled by Chicago-born Princeton historian R. R. (Robert Roswell) Palmer, 32, is about the French Revolution; The Colossus of Maroussi by novelist Henry Miller, who visited Greece 2 years ago; American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman by F. O. Matthiessen; The Mind of the South by South Carolina-born journalist W. J. (Wilbur Joseph) Cash, 40, whose masterpiece wins him a Guggenheim Fellowship; Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by Tennessee-born Time magazine film critic James Agee, 31, who has studied the plight of Alabama sharecroppers for the Farm Security Administration. Uncaptioned photographs by Walker Evans, now 37, confront Americans with the realities of rural poverty in the South; Business as Usual by Philadelphia-born Nation magazine associate editor I. F. Stone (originally Isidor Feinstein), 33; Reveille in Washington by Newburgh, N.Y.-born historian Margaret (Kenochan) Leech, 46; The Mysterious Science of the Law by Atlanta-born Harvard Law School instructor Daniel J. (Joseph) Boorstin, 26; Low Man on a Totem Pole by Illinois-born author H. (Harry) Allen Smith, 33, whose collection of autobiographical sketches and anecdotes about people whom he met and interviewed while working as a feature writer and rewrite man for the New York World-Telegram is a bestseller.

Philosopher Henri Bergson dies at his native Paris January 4 at age 81; foreign correspondent-author Dorothy Thompson at Lisbon January 31 at age 66; classicist Sir J. G. Frazer at Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, May 7 at age 87; W. J. Cash arrives at Mexico City, falls ill with dysentery, and hangs himself by his necktie in his Reforma Hotel room July 2 at age 40; former Harvard Shakespeare scholar George Lyman Kittredge dies at Barnstable, Mass., July 23 at age 81; jurist-political theorist Gaetano Mosca at Rome November 8 at age 83, having seen his ideas misinterpreted to support Fascism.

Fiction: Hadrian's Memoirs (Les Mèmoires d'Hadrien) by Marguerite Yourcenar; The Fancy Dress Party (La mascherata) by Alberto Moravia enrages Benito Mussolini, who personally censors the novel when he realizes that Moravia's South American dictator represents Il Duce; Conversation in Sicily (Conversazione in Sicilia) by Sicilian-born novelist Elio Vittorini, 37; The Harvesters (Paesi tuoi) by Cesare Pavese; Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler, who completed his novel about Stalin's 1937 Moscow show trials in a Vichy concentration camp; Scum of the Earth by Koestler, who shows the misery inside concentration camps; A Woman of the Pharisees (La Pharisienne) by François Mauriac, now 55, who has denounced fascism and works with the French Résistance; The Pasquier Chronicles (Chronique des Pasquier) by Georges Duhamel; Herself Surprised by Joyce Cary; A Curtain of Green (stories) by Mississippi writer Eudora Welty, 32; Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers; The Last Tycoon by the late F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose final novel, unfinished at his death last year, is based roughly on the late M-G-M producer Irving Thalberg; That None Shall Die by Washington, D.C.-born Jacksonville, Fla. surgeon-turned-novelist Frank G. (Gill) Slaughter, 33, who will go on to publish 56 books that will have sales of an estimated 60 million copies; What Makes Sammy Run? by New York-born novelist Budd (Wilson) Schulberg, 27, whose father is a leading Hollywood producer; Mildred Pierce by James M. Cain; The Journal of Albion Moonlight by Ohio-born experimental poet-novelist Kenneth Patchen, 29; The Seventh Cross (Das Siebente Kreuz) by émigrée German novelist Anna Seghers (Netty Radvanyi), 41; The Keys of the Kingdom by A. J. Cronin; H. M. Pulham, Esq. by John P. Marquand; Saratoga Trunk by Edna Ferber; Junior Miss (stories) by St. Louis-born Hollywood scriptwriter Sally Benson (née Sara Mahala Smith), 41; The Song of Bernadette by Franz Werfel, who has come to America to escape Nazi oppression; Wine of the Country by Hamilton Basso; Dagger of the Mind by Kenneth Fearing; Above Suspicion by Scottish-born U.S. mystery novelist Helen Clark MacInnes, 33; Traitor's Purse by Margery Allingham.

Novelist James Joyce dies of a perforated ulcer at Zürich January 13 at age 58; Sherwood Anderson at Colón, Panama, March 8 at age 64; Elizabeth Madox Roberts at Orlando, Fla., March 13 at age 54; Isaac Babel in a Soviet concentration camp March 17 at age 46; Virginia Woolf drowns herself March 28 at age 69 in the River Ouse near her Sussex home (she has had at least one nervous breakdown and fears another); Sir Hugh Walpole dies at his home near Keswick, Cumberland, June 1 at age 57; Hjalmar Soderberg at Copenhagen October 14 at age 72.

Poetry: Open House by Michigan-born Pennsylvania State teacher Theodore Roethke, 33; 55 Poems by New York-born poet Louis Zukofsky, 37; "David" by Calgary-born Canadian poet (Alfred) Earle Birney, 37, whose controversial verses about the mercy killing of a young mountain climber badly injured in a fall will be included in most Canadian high-school curricula; Poems de la France malheureuse by Jules Supervielle; La Crève-Coeur by novelist-poet Louis Aragon, now 43, who served with distinction against the Germans.

Poet Karin Boye dies by her own hand at Alingas, Sweden, April 24 at age 40; poet-playwright and 1913 Nobelist Rabindranath Tagore is moved from Shantiniketan to his native Calcutta for surgery but dies there August 7 at age 80 in the house where he was born, having written more than 2,000 songs (some Western admirers will rank him with Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare); Marina Tsvetaeva hangs herself August 31 at Yelabuga, a small town in the Tatar Autonomous Republic. Not yet 49, she was evacuated from Russia in the path of approaching German forces, but she and her teenage son have been destitute.

Juvenile: Curious George by German-born U.S. writer-illustrator H. A. (Hans Augusto) Rey, 43, and his wife, Margaret E., 35, whose monkey George will appear in six sequels (the Reys were living in Paris in June of last year, bicycled south before the Wehrmacht arrived, reached Lisbon, sailed to Rio, and arrived at New York in October of last year); My Friend Flicka by Cape May Point, N.J.-born author Mary O'Hara (Mary O'Hara Alsop Stuart-Vasa), 56, who has worked as a Wyoming rancher; I Discovered Columbus by Robert Lawson (an account of the Great Navigator by his parrot Aurelio).

Puffin Story Books are introduced by Britain's Penguin Books, Ltd., whose low-priced, paperback children's books revolutionize that category of publishing.