1949 - Literature

Literature

Nonfiction: The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who says liberalism must stand between totalitarian extremes of communism and fascism; The Second Sex (Le Deuxième Sexe) by French philosopher and novelist Simone de Beauvoir, 41, will be the bible of feminists (an English translation will appear in 1953). De Beauvoir condemns marriage as an "obscene bourgeois institution" that keeps women from true individuality; Male and Female by Margaret Mead; The Need for Roots (L'Enracinement) by the late French writer Simone Weil; The Mediterranean and The Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II by French historian (Paul Achille) Fernand Braudel, 47, who focuses on the lives of ordinary people (he studied before the war under Lucien Febvre and wrote the first drafts of his books from memory during his 5 years in a German prisoner-of-war camp); The Mature Mind by City College of New York philosophy professor Harry A. Overstreet, 72; American Freedom and Catholic Power by Ohio-born atheist Paul Blanshard, now 57, who attended Union Theological Seminary, became a Congregationalist minister in 1917, renounced Christianity a year later as fraudulent, and now creates a storm of controversy by saying that nuns are relics of "an age when women allegedly enjoyed subjection and reveled in self-abasement," claiming that Roman Catholic influence represents a political power that is dictating human behavior and social policy in America, and decrying demands that parochial schools be given a share of public educational funding.

Historian James Truslow Adams dies at Southport, Conn., May 18 at age 70.

Fiction: The Train Was on Time (Der Zug war puenktlich) (novella) by Cologne-born novelist Heinrich (Theodor) Böll, 31, who has resolved not to let Germans forget their Nazi past; Conjugal Love (L'Amore Coniugale e Altri Racconti) by Alberto Moravia, whose prostitutes are his most sympathetic characters; The House on the Hill (La Casa in Collina) by Cesare Pavese; Iron in the Soul (The Troubled Sleep or La Mort dans l'ame) by Jean-Paul Sartre; The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen; El Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges; The Oasis by Mary McCarthy; The House of Incest by Anaïs Nin; The Sheltering Sky by émigré composer-novelist-poet-translator Paul Bowles, now 38, who has been living at Tangier; A Rage to Live by John O'Hara; The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren is about drug addiction; The Beginning and the End by Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, 38; Point of No Return by John P. Marquand; "No Consultation Today" ("Honjitsu Kyushin") (story) by Masuji Ibuse; The Third Man by Graham Greene; Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, whose book is a chilling projection of a totalitarian state whose authorities exercise mind control ("Big Brother Is Watching You"). Orwell introduces the inverted graffiti "Ignorance Is Strength" and "Freedom Is Slavery" along with such portmanteau words as newspeak, bellyfeel, and doublethink. "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past," says one of Orwell's characters (compare Santayana, 1905); Time of Hope by C. P. Snow; Tournament by Mississippi-born novelist Shelby Foote, 32; Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford; The Moving Target by California-born mystery writer John MacDonald (Kenneth Millar), 33.

Novelist Sigrid Undset dies at Lillehammer, Norway, June 10 at age 67; Margaret Mitchell is killed by a speeding automobile at her native Atlanta August 16 at age 49; Edith A. O. Somerville of Somerville and Ross dies at Castlehaven, County Cork, Ireland, October 8 at age 91; Hervey Allen of a heart attack at his Bonfield Manor, Md., home December 28 at age 60.

Poetry: The Arrivistes by Jamaican-born New York poet Louis Simpson, 26; The Art of Early Wisdom by Kenneth Rexroth; The Labyrinth by Edwin Muir; By Avon River by H. D. (Hilda Doolittle); Hope (La espera) by José María Valverde; Book of Algae (Libro de las algas) by Ignacio Aldecoa; Woman to Man by Judith Wright.

The Library of Congress confers the first Bollingen Prize for Poetry February 20 (see 1948). All but three of the 14 Fellows in American Letters have awarded the $1,000 prize to Ezra Pound for his Pisan Cantos (Garrison Chapin and Karl Shapiro have voted for William Carlos Williams, Paul Green has abstained), news that Pound has won the prize creates a storm of controversy in the press and in Congress, Pound receives his money, but the Library of Congress returns $9,000 to the Bollingen Foundation, whose trustees will hereafter grant the money to the Yale University Library so that the prize may be continued.