This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1941.
Events
- January 3 – A decree (Normalschrifterlass) promulgated in Nazi Germany by Martin Bormann on behalf of Adolf Hitler requires replacement of blackletter typefaces by Antiqua.[1]
- January 20 – Chittadhar Hridaya begins a 6-year sentence of imprisonment in Kathmandu for writing poetry in Nepal Bhasa during which time he secretly composes his Buddhist epic Sugata Saurabha in the same language.
- January 21–January 23 – A failed "Legionary Rebellion" in Bucharest, opposing loyalists of the Ion Antonescu government to the radically fascist Iron Guard; doubles as a pogrom against Romanian Jews. Avant-garde poet Ion Barbu joins a rebel squad storming into the Ministry of Education;[2] meanwhile, his colleague Ion Vinea protects a Jewish friend, novelist Sergiu Dan.[3] The destruction of Jewish life and property is documented from inside the Jewish community by photojournalist F. Brunea-Fox,[4] and by Marcel Janco. Janco's brother-in-law, essayist Jacques G. Costin, survives, but his brother is tortured and killed by the Guard; the murder prompts Janco to leave for British Palestine in February.[5]
- Spring – The Antioch Review is founded as a literary magazine at Antioch College in Ohio.
- April – Jean-Paul Sartre is released from prisoner of war camp on health grounds.
- April 6 – National Library of Serbia destroyed by bombing.[6]
- April 19 – Bertolt Brecht's play Mother Courage and Her Children (Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder) is premiered at the Schauspielhaus Zürich in Switzerland with Therese Giehse in the title rôle.[7]
- May 5 – Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin meet while both reading English at St John's College, Oxford.[8]
- May 21 – 1941 theatre strike in Norway begins: Actors in the Norwegian professional theatre strike in response to the revocation of work permits for six actors who refused to perform on state radio for the Quisling regime under the occupation of Norway by Nazi Germany.
- June – Noël Coward's comedy Blithe Spirit is premiered at Manchester Opera House in England. Opening in London on July 2, its run of 1,997 consecutive performances sets a record for non-musical plays in the West End theatre which will not be surpassed for more than twenty years.[9] The original cast stars Kay Hammond as Elvira, Margaret Rutherford as Madame Arcati, Cecil Parker as Charles and Fay Compton as Ruth.[10] The Broadway premiere takes place on November 5 at the Morosco Theatre.
- June 22 – Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi-led attack on the Soviet Union. Among the refugees is Moldovan Jewish poet Alexandru Robot, declared missing and presumed dead by August.[11]
- June 29 – Iași pogrom in Nazi-allied Romania, witnessed by Italian war correspondent Curzio Malaparte, who recounts it in a chapter of his novel Kaputt (1944), for long the only work to deal with the events.[12]
- August 6 – C. S. Lewis begins a series of BBC Radio broadcasts that will be adapted as Mere Christianity.[13]
- August 18 – 19-year-old Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee, Jr., a poet of American paternity serving in Britain with the Royal Canadian Air Force, flies a high-altitude test flight in a Spitfire V from RAF Llandow in Wales and afterwards writes the sonnet "High Flight" about the experience (completed by September 3); on December 11 he dies in a collision over England.
- September – In Nazi-allied Romania, George Călinescu puts out his companion to Romanian literature (Istoria literaturii române de la origini până în prezent). It is condemned in the far-right press for including entries on Romanian Jewish writers, whose work had been explicitly banned,[14] and is eventually pulled from circulation; its own racialist undertones are criticized by various intellectuals, Jewish (Felix Aderca, Mihail Sebastian) as well as Romanian (Șerban Cioculescu, Mihai Ralea, Vladimir Streinu).[15]
- September 6–7 – Under Nazi occupation, Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever is among the Polish Jews interned in the Vilna Ghetto.
- c. October – The first known reference to Babi Yar in poetry is written soon after the Babi Yar massacres by the young Jewish-Ukrainian poet from Kiev and an eyewitness, Liudmila Titova; her poem "Babi Yar" will be discovered only in the 1990s.[16]
- October 27 – F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Last Tycoon, left unfinished on the author's death in 1940, is edited by Edmund Wilson and published by Charles Scribner's Sons in New York City.[17]
- November – Brendan Behan is released from Borstal in England and deported to Ireland.
- December
- New building for National and University Library of Slovenia in Ljubljana, designed by Jože Plečnik in 1930/31, is completed.
- Biblioteca Cantonale (Cantonal Library) in Lugano, Canton of Ticino in neutral Switzerland, designed by Rino and Carlo Tami, is completed.
- Bosnian Serb writer Branko Ćopić joins the Yugoslav Partisans.
- Poet Ezra Pound applies to return to the United States from Italy but is refused. He begins appearing on Rome Radio, making antisemitic broadcasts sympathetic to the Axis powers.[20]
- Classic Comics series launched in the United States with a version of The Three Musketeers.
New books
Children and young people
Births
- January 19 – Colin Gunton, English theologian and academic (died 2003)
- January 24 – Gary K. Wolf, American humorist
- March 13
- March 22 – Billy Collins, American poet
- April 10 – Paul Theroux, American novelist and travel writer
- May 13 – Miles Kington, Northern Irish-born humorist and journalist (died 2008)
- May 19 – Nora Ephron, American novelist and screenwriter (died 2012)
- May 24 – Bob Dylan, born Robert Allen Zimmerman, American singer-songwriter, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature
- June 5 – Spalding Gray, American screenwriter and dramatist (died 2004)
- June 27 – James P. Hogan, English-born American science fiction author (died 2010)
- July 12 – John Lahr, American-born author and critic
- August 9
- September 1 – Gwendolyn MacEwen, Canadian poet (died 1987)
- September 3 – Sergei Dovlatov, Russian short-story writer and novelist (died 1990)
- September 15 – Lindsay Barrett, Jamaican novelist, poet and journalist
- October 2 – John Sinclair, American poet
- October 4 – Anne Rice, American horror/fantasy writer
- October 10 – Ken Saro-Wiwa, Nigerian writer (executed, died 1995)
- October 13 – John Snow, English cricketer and poet
- October 20 – Stewart Parker, Northern Irish poet and playwright (died 1988)
- October 25 – Anne Tyler, American novelist
- October 27 – Gerd Brantenberg, Norwegian novelist, author and feminist
- December 5 – Sheridan Morley, English biographer and critic (died 2007)
- Unknown dates
Deaths
- January 4 – Henri Bergson, French philosopher (born 1859)
- January 6
- January 13 – James Joyce, Irish novelist and poet (born 1882)
- January 23 – William Arthur Dunkerley (John Oxenham), English journalist, novelist and poet (born 1852)
- February 7 – Banjo Paterson, Australian bush poet (born 1864)
- February 9 – Elizabeth von Arnim, Australian-born English novelist (born 1866)
- February 24 – Robert Byron, English travel writer (born 1905; torpedoed)
- March 13 – Elizabeth Madox Roberts, American novelist and poet (born 1881)
- March 28 – Virginia Woolf, English novelist and writer (born 1882; suicide)
- June 1 – Sir Hugh Walpole, New Zealand-born English novelist (born 1884)
- June 15 – Evelyn Underhill, English poet, mystic and pacifist (born 1875)
- July 4 – Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński, Polish writer, translator and gynecologist (born 1874)
- August 7 – Rabindranath Tagore, Bengali polymath and writer (born 1861)
- August 31 – Marina Tsvetaeva, Soviet Russian poet (born 1892; suicide)
- September 19 – H. E. Marshall, Scottish history writer for children (born 1867)
- November 18 – Émile Nelligan, French Canadian poet (born 1879)
- Unknown date – Anne Elliot, English novelist (born 1856)
References
- ↑ ""The Bormann Decree" banning the use of the Fraktur typeface". About.com. Retrieved 2013-10-23.
- ↑ Râpeanu, Valeriu (2003-04-12). "Când totul se prăbușea". Curierul Național. Bucharest.
- ↑ Coposu, Corneliu (2014). "Corneliu Coposu despre atitudinea lui Iuliu Maniu față de evrei". Caiete Silvane (in Romanian) (112). Archived from the original on 2015-07-05.
- ↑ Crohmălniceanu, Ovid S. (2001). Evreii în mișcarea de avangardă românească. Bucharest: Editura Hasefer. pp. 130–132. ISBN 973-8056-52-7.
- ↑ Sandqvist, Tom (2006). Dada East. The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London: MIT Press. pp. 379–380. ISBN 0-262-19507-0.
- ↑ "The Nazis Destroy the National Library of Serbia". Jeremy Norman's HistoryofInformation.com. 2016-05-04. Retrieved 2016-05-06.
- ↑ Therese Giehse interview with W. Stuart McDowell, 1968, in "Acting Brecht: The Munich Years," The Brecht Sourcebook, Carol Martin, Henry Bial, editors (Routledge, 2000) p. 71.
- ↑ Bradford, Richard (2012). The Odd Couple: The curious friendship between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin. London: Robson Press. ISBN 9781849543750.
- ↑ Day, Barry (2005). Coward on Film: The Cinema of Noël Coward. Scarecrow Press. p. 83. ISBN 0-8108-5358-2.
- ↑ "Piccadilly Theatre: Blithe Spirit by Noel Coward". The Times (48968). London. 1941-07-03. p. 2.
- ↑ Colesnic, Iurie (2006). "Alexandru Robot – poetul enigmelor (90 de ani de la naștere)" (PDF). Magazin Bibliologic (in Romanian) (1): 73. Archived from the original on 2012-02-27.
- ↑ Gheorghiu, Mihai-Dinu (2011). "The Iași Pogrom in Curzio Malaparte's Kaputt: Between History and Fiction". In Glăjar, Valentina; Teodorescu, Jeanine. Local History, Transnational Memory in the Romanian Holocaust. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 47–56. ISBN 978-1-349-29451-0.
- ↑ Perry, Mike W. (1998-07-01). "Publication History of C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity". C. S. Lewis Web. Retrieved 2013-12-02.
- ↑ Rotman, Liviu (2008). Demnitate în vremuri de restriște. Bucharest: Editura Hasefer, Federation of Jewish Communities of Romania & Elie Wiesel National Institute for Studying the Holocaust in Romania. pp. 174–177. ISBN 978-973-630-189-6.
- ↑ Boia, Lucian (2012). Capcanele istoriei. Elita intelectuală românească între 1930 și 1950. Bucharest: Humanitas. pp. 238–245. ISBN 978-973-50-3533-4.
- ↑ "Первые стихи о Бабьем Яре. Людмила Титова". Babiy-Yar.Livejournal.com. 2012-10-04. Archived from the original on 2013-04-07. Retrieved 2013-02-23.
- ↑ Adams, J. Donald (1941-11-09). "Scott Fitzgerald's Last Novel". The New York Times. Retrieved 2014-01-08.
- ↑ Epstien, Thomas (2004). "Vvedensky in Love". The New Arcadia Review. Boston College Honors Program. 2. Archived from the original on 2010-12-08. Retrieved 2006-12-08.
- ↑ "Penguin Archive Timeline". University of Bristol. Retrieved 2013-10-30.
- ↑ Ackroyd, Peter (1980). "Chronology". Ezra Pound and his world. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd. p. 118. ISBN 0500130698.
- ↑ Keating, H. R. F. (1982). Whodunit? – a guide to crime, suspense and spy fiction. London: Windward. ISBN 0-7112-0249-4.
- ↑ Hopkins, Chris (2007). English Fiction in the 1930s: Language, Genre, History. London: Continuum International Publishing Group. pp. 138–57. ISBN 0826489389.
- ↑ Cox, Michael, ed. (2004). The Concise Oxford Chronology of English Literature. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-860634-6.
- ↑ Daughter Vivyan Leonora Eyles (1909–1984) was still in Italy with her husband Mario Praz.