1932 in literature

This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1932.

Events

• March – Captain W. E. Johns' English character Biggles (James Bigglesworth) is introduced as a World War I pilot in the short story "The White Fokker" in the first issue of Popular Flying magazine edited by Johns. In August, the first collection of Biggles stories, The Camels are Coming, is published.
• April 23 – Opening of Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.
• April 26 – 32-year-old American poet Hart Crane throws himself overboard from the steamship Orizaba in the Gulf of Mexico en route from Mexico to New York in a state of alcoholic depression; his body is never recovered.^[1]
• May – First issue of the English journal of literary criticism Scrutiny: a quarterly review edited by F. R. Leavis.
• June 28 – Following a visit to the United States, Alice Hargreaves, the inspiration for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, meets publisher Peter Llewelyn Davies, the inspiration for Peter Pan, at a Lewis Carroll centenary exhibition in a London bookshop.^[2]
• July – W. B. Yeats leases Riversdale house in the Dublin suburb of Rathfarnham and publishes Words for Music Perhaps, and Other Poems.^[3]
• Summer
  • Open Air Theatre, Regent's Park, is established as a regular venue in London by Sydney Carroll and Robert Atkins.
  • First performances at the Minack Theatre, an open-air venue on the coast of Cornwall (England), a staging of The Tempest.
• October 3 – The Times newspaper of London first appears set in the Times New Roman typeface devised by Stanley Morison.^[4]
• November 16 – Compton Mackenzie is prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act in the U.K. for material in his Greek Memories.^[5]
• October – Nineteen Irish writers led by Yeats and George Bernard Shaw form an Academy of Irish Letters primarily to oppose the Censorship of Publications Board.^[6]
• December – E. V. Knox replaces Sir Owen Seaman as editor of Punch magazine.
• Samuel Beckett's first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, is written in Paris and rejected by several publishers.
• The first issues of Graham Greene's novel Stamboul Train (published by Heinemann in London) are withdrawn and the text altered under threat of a libel action by J. B. Priestley.
• Serialization of the first three volumes of Mikhail Sholokhov's novel And Quiet Flows the Don (Тихий Дон) concludes in the Soviet magazine October.
• In Vietnam, the New Poetry (Thơ mới) period begins, marked by an article and a poem of Phan Khôi, inaugurating modern literature in that country.

New books

Fiction

• Laura Adams Armer – Waterless Mountain
• Henry Bellamann – The Richest Woman in Town
• Gerald Tyrwhitt-Wilson, 14th Baron Berners (as Adela Quebec) – The Girls of Radcliff Hall (privately circulated roman à clef)
• Hermann Broch – The Sleepwalkers (Die Schlafwandler, trilogy completed)
• John Buchan – The Gap in the Curtain
• Pearl S. Buck – Sons
• Edgar Rice Burroughs – Tarzan Triumphant
• Erskine Caldwell – Tobacco Road
• Morley Callaghan – A Broken Journey
• John Dickson Carr
  • The Waxworks Murder
  • Poison in Jest
• Louis-Ferdinand Céline – Journey to the End of the Night (Voyage au bout de la nuit)
• Agatha Christie
  • Peril at End House
  • The Thirteen Problems
• Colette – The Pure and the Impure (Le Pur et l'impur)
• John Creasey – Seven Times Seven
• A. J. Cronin – Three Loves
• John Dos Passos – 1919
• Hans Fallada – Little Man, What Now? (Kleiner Mann, was nun?)
• William Faulkner – Light in August
• Lion Feuchtwanger – Josephus
• Rudolph Fisher – The Conjure Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem
• Elena Fortún – Celia en el colegio
• Lewis Grassic Gibbon – Sunset Song
• Stella Gibbons – Cold Comfort Farm
• Jean Giono – Blue Boy
• Ellen Glasgow – The Sheltered Life
• Graham Greene – Stamboul Train
• Ernst Haffner – Blood Brothers (Blutsbrüder)
• Hermann Hesse – Journey to the East (Die Morgenlandfahrt)
• Soeman Hs – Mentjahari Pentjoeri Anak Perawan
• Aldous Huxley – Brave New World
• Francis Iles (Anthony Berkeley Cox) – Before the Fact
• Irmgard Keun – The Artificial Silk Girl (Das kunstseidene Mädchen)
• W. Somerset Maugham – The Narrow Corner
• Nancy Mitford – Christmas Pudding
• Abdul Muis – Pertemuan Jodoh
• Vladimir Nabokov
  • Glory
  • Laughter in the Dark
• Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall – Mutiny on the Bounty
• Seán Ó Faoláin – Midsummer Night Madness and Other Stories
• Anthony Powell – Venusberg
• John Cowper Powys – A Glastonbury Romance
• Ellery Queen
  • The Greek Coffin Mystery
  • The Egyptian Cross Mystery
• Joseph Roth – Radetzky March (Radetzkymarsch)
• Damon Runyon – Guys and Dolls
• Dorothy L. Sayers – Have His Carcase
• Israel Joshua Singer – Yoshe Kalb
• J. Slauerhoff – Het verboden rijk ("The Forbidden Kingdom", serial publication concludes and first book publication)
• Thorne Smith – Topper Takes a Trip
• Lesbia Soravilla – El dolor de-vivir
• John Steinbeck – The Pastures of Heaven
• Julia Strachey – Cheerful Weather for the Wedding
• Margareta Suber – Charlie
• Phoebe Atwood Taylor – Death Lights a Candle
• Wallace Thurman – Infants Of The Spring
• Sigrid Undset
  • Burning Bush
  • The Son Avenger
• Maxence Van Der Meersch - The House on the Dune
• Hugh Walpole – The Fortress
• Evelyn Waugh – Black Mischief
• Charles Williams – The Greater Trumps
• S. Fowler Wright
  • Beyond the Rim
  • The New Gods Lead (short stories)
• Francis Brett Young – The House Under the Water

Children and young people

• Laura Adams Armer – Waterless Mountain
• W. E. Johns (as William Earle) – The Camels Are Coming (first in Biggles series)
• Arthur Ransome – Peter Duck
• Alison Uttley – Moonshine and Magic
• Laura Ingalls Wilder – Little House in the Big Woods

Drama

• Elias Canetti – Hochzeit (Wedding)
• Noël Coward – Design for Living
• Ferdinand Kwasi Fiawoo – Toko Atolia
• George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber – Dinner at Eight
• Marcel Pagnol – Fanny
• Ahmed Shawqi – Amirat el-Andalus (The Andalusian Princess)
• Ödön von Horváth – Kasimir und Karoline

Poetry

• W. H. Auden – The Orators
• Cecil Day-Lewis – From Feathers To Iron
• An "Objectivist's" Anthology
• Boris Pasternak – The Second Birth

Non-fiction

• Adrian Bell – The Cherry Tree
• Henri Bergson – The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion)
• Emil Brunner – The Divine Imperative: a study in Christian ethics (Gebot und die Ordnungen)
• Bernard DeVoto – Mark Twain's America
• Annabel Jackson – A Victorian Childhood
• T. S. Eliot – Selected Essays, 1917–1932
• J. B. S. Haldane – The Causes of Evolution
• Hugh Kingsmill – Frank Harris
• F. R. Leavis – New Bearings in English Poetry
• Q. D. Leavis – Fiction and the Reading Public
• Maxwell House Haggadah
• Beverley Nichols – Down the Garden Path
• Walter B. Pitkin – Life Begins at Forty
• Florence White – Good Things in England (food)
• S. Fowler Wright – The Life of Sir Walter Scott

Births

Gay Talese

• January 5 – Umberto Eco, Italian novelist and semiotician (died 2016)
• January 18 – Robert Anton Wilson, American novelist and playwright (died 2007)
• January 19 – George MacBeth, Scottish poet and novelist (died 1992)
• February 7 – Gay Talese, American literary journalist
• February 15 – Troy Kennedy Martin, Scottish scriptwriter (died 2009)
• February 16 – Aharon Appelfeld, Israeli novelist and poet
• March 4 – Ryszard Kapuściński, Polish journalist, traveller, poet and writer (died 2007)
• March 18 – John Updike, American novelist and poet (died 2009)
• March 31 – John Jakes, American historical novelist
• May 7 – Jenny Joseph, English poet
• May 8 – Julieta Campos, Cuban-Mexican author and translator (died 2007)
• May 24 – Arnold Wesker, English dramatist (died 2016)
• June 5 – Christy Brown, Irish autobiographer and poet (died 1981)
• June 6 – Sara Banerji, English author and sculptor
• June 18 – Geoffrey Hill, English poet (died 2016)
• July 17 – Karla Kuskin, American children's writer and illustrator (died 2009)
• August 16 – Christopher Okigbo, Nigerian poet (died 1967)
• August 17 – V. S. Naipaul, Trinidad-born novelist
• August 27 – Antonia Fraser, English biographer, novelist and historian
• September 7 – Malcolm Bradbury, English novelist (died 2000)
• October 27 – Sylvia Plath, American poet (suicide 1963)

Deaths

• January 12 – Ella Hepworth Dixon, English writer, novelist and editor (born 1857)
• January 21 – Lytton Strachey, English biographer (cancer, born 1880)^[7]
• January 28 – F. M. Mayor, English novelist (born 1872)
• February 10 – Edgar Wallace, English crime writer (diabetes, born 1875)
• February 15 – Minnie Maddern Fiske, American actress and playwright (born 1865)
• March 16 – Harold Monro, British poet and poetry bookshop proprietor (alcohol-related, born 1879)
• April 20 – Giuseppe Peano, Italian mathematician and philosopher (born 1858)
• April 26 – Hart Crane, American poet (suicide, born 1899)
• May 22 – Augusta, Lady Gregory, Irish dramatist (born 1852)
• June 17 – Sir John Quick, Australian politician and author (born 1852)
• July 6 – Kenneth Grahame, Scottish-born children's and short-story writer (born 1859)
• July 20 – René Bazin, French novelist (born 1853)
• July 22 – J. Meade Falkner, English novelist and poet (born 1858)
• August 29 – Raymond Knister, Canadian writer (drowned, born 1899)
• September 5 – Paul Bern, German-American screenwriter (suicide, born 1889)
• October 5 – Christopher Brennan, Australian poet (born 1870)
• October 14 – Ahmed Shawqi, Egyptian poet (born 1868)
• November 17 – Charles W. Chesnutt, American writer (born 1858)
• November 23 – Henry S. Whitehead, American genre novelist (gastric ailment, born 1882)^[8]

Awards

• James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: Helen de Guerry Simpson, Boomerang
• James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: Stephen Gwynn, The Life of Mary Kingsley
• Newbery Medal for children's literature: Laura Adams Armer, Waterless Mountain
• Nobel Prize for literature: John Galsworthy
• Pulitzer Prize for Drama: George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, Ira Gershwin, Of Thee I Sing
• Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: George Dillon: The Flowering Stone
• Pulitzer Prize for the Novel: Pearl S. Buck: The Good Earth

References