Events
- January 3 – A decree (Normalschrifterlaß) issued in Nazi Germany by Martin Bormann on behalf of Adolf Hitler calls for replacement of blackletter typefaces by Antiqua. [1]
- January 20 – Chittadhar Hridaya begins a six-year sentence of imprisonment in Kathmandu for writing poetry in Nepal Bhasa, during which time he secretly composes his Buddhist epic Sugata Saurabha in that language.
- January 21–23 – 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, the novelist Sergiu Dan. [3] The destruction of Jewish life and property is documented from inside the Jewish community by the 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.
- March
- Jean-Paul Sartre is released from prisoner-of-war camp on health grounds. [6]
- Eugene O'Neill completes Long Day's Journey into Night (published and premiered in 1956).
- Publication of Lord David Cecil's The English Poets by William Collins in London, first of the 'Britain in Pictures' series devised by Hilda Matheson (died 1940) to celebrate British identity. [7]
- April 6 – The National Library of Serbia is destroyed by bombing.
- April 19 – Bertolt Brecht's anti-war play Mother Courage and Her Children (Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder) is launched at the Schauspielhaus Zürich in Switzerland, with Therese Giehse in the title rôle. [8]
- May 5 – Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin meet while both reading English at St John's College, Oxford. [9]
- May 10/11 – The Blitz: 250,000 books are burned in the Library stacks of the British Museum in London as a result of incendiary bombing. [10]
- May 21 – The 1941 theatre strike in Norway begins. Actors in the Norwegian professional theater strike in response to the revocation of work permits for six actors who refuse to perform on state radio for the Quisling regime during the occupation of Norway by Nazi Germany.
- June – Noël Coward's comedy Blithe Spirit is premièred 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. [11] The original cast stars Kay Hammond as Elvira, Margaret Rutherford as Madame Arcati, Cecil Parker as Charles and Fay Compton as Ruth. [12] The Broadway première takes place on November 5 at the Morosco Theatre.
- June 22 – Among those fleeing the Operation Barbarossa attack on the Soviet Union is a Moldovan Jewish poet, Alexandru Robot, declared missing, presumed dead by August. [13]
- June 29
- For unknown reasons, the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács is arrested by the NKVD and held at Lubyanka Building in Moscow; he will be released on August 26, possibly after a plea made by Mátyás Rákosi. [14]
- The Iași pogrom in Nazi-allied Romania is witnessed by the 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. [15]
- August 6 – C. S. Lewis begins a series of BBC Radio broadcasts that give rise to Mere Christianity . [16]
- August 18 – Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee, Jr., a 19-year-old poet of American paternity serving in Britain with the Royal Canadian Air Force, makes a high-altitude test flight in a Spitfire V from RAF Llandow in Wales, and then by September 3 completes the sonnet "High Flight" about the experience. On December 11 he dies in an air collision over England.
- Fall – Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine is launched under the editorship of Frederic Dannay, by Lawrence E. Spivak's Mercury Publications in New York City. [17]
- September – In Nazi-allied Romania, George Călinescu publishes 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 has been explicitly banned. [18] It is eventually withdrawn from circulation, but its own racist undertones are criticized by intellectuals such as the Jewish (Felix Aderca and Mihail Sebastian) and the Romanian (Șerban Cioculescu, Mihai Ralea and Vladimir Streinu). [19]
- 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, the work of the young Jewish-Ukrainian poet from Kyiv and an eyewitness, Liudmila Titova; her poem "Babi Yar" will be discovered only in the 1990s. [20]
- October 27 – F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Last Tycoon , unfinished on his death in 1940, is edited by Edmund Wilson and published by Charles Scribner's Sons in New York City. [21]
- November – Brendan Behan is released from Borstal in England and deported back to Ireland.
- December
- During the Siege of Leningrad, Yakov Druskin, ill and starving, and Maria Malich, second wife of Russian avant-garde poet Danil Kharms (arrested this summer for treason and imprisoned in the psychiatric ward at Leningrad Prison No. 1, where he will die in 1942), trudge to Kharms' bombed-out apartment building to collect a trunk of manuscripts, so preserving his work and that of Alexander Vvedensky's for decades until it can be circulated. [22] Vvedensky, arrested in September in Kharkiv for "counterrevolutionary agitation", is evacuated, but dies of pleurisy on the way.
- Penguin Books publishes in the U.K. the first story book in its Puffin Books children's paperback imprint: Worzel Gummidge by Barbara Euphan Todd. The series editor is Eleanor Graham. [23]
- unknown dates
- The new National and University Library of Slovenia building in Ljubljana, designed by Jože Plečnik in 1930/1931, is completed and opened to the public. [24]
- Biblioteca Cantonale (Cantonal Library) at Lugano in the Italian-speaking Canton of Ticino in neutral Switzerland, designed by Rino and Carlo Tami, is completed.
- The Bosnian Serb writer Branko Ćopić joins the Yugoslav Partisans. [25]
- The poet Ezra Pound applies unsuccessfully to return to the U.S. from Italy. He begins appearing on Rome Radio with antisemitic broadcasts sympathetic to the Axis powers. [26]
- The Classic Comics series is launched in the United States with a version of The Three Musketeers .
