1937 in literature
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1937.
– BBC Television broadcasts The Underground Murder Mystery by J. Bissell Thomas from London, the first play to be written for television.[1]
January 19
– John Steinbeck's novella of the Great Depression, Of Mice and Men, appears in the United States.
February 6
– BBC Television broadcasts a 30-minute excerpt of Twelfth Night, the first known television broadcast of a Shakespeare piece. The cast includes Peggy Ashcroft and Greer Garson.
May 14
– Penguin Books in the U.K. launches Pelican Books, a sixpenny paperback non-fiction imprint, with a two-volume edition of George Bernard Shaw's The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism.[2]
May 21
science fiction magazine
– The New England Quarterly prints poems by a colonial American pastor, Edward Taylor (died 1729), discovered by Thomas H. Johnson.[4]
June 30
Summer – American-born writer meets German-born novelist Klaus Mann in Europe and they start a relationship.
Thomas Quinn Curtiss
Buchenwald concentration camp
– The Lost Colony a historical drama by Paul Green, is first performed at an outdoor theater in the place where it is set: Roanoke Island, North Carolina.
July 4
– Stephen Vincent Benét's post-apocalyptic short story By the Waters of Babylon, inspired by April's Bombing of Guernica, is published in the U.S. The Saturday Evening Post as "The Place of the Gods".
July 31
– The Soviet playwright Sergei Tretyakov commits suicide while under sentence of death at Butyrka prison in Moscow as part of the Great Purge.[8]
September 10
– J. R. R. Tolkien's juvenile fantasy novel The Hobbit, or There and Back Again is published in England by George Allen & Unwin on the recommendation of young Rayner Unwin.
September 21
– The fictional Mrs. Miniver appears in a column on domestic life by Jan Struther for The Times, London.[9]
October 6
November 11
Journey's End
– Dr. Seuss's first book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, is published by Vanguard Press.
December 21
unknown dates
National Library of Iran
– Orașele înecate (Sunken Cities)
Felix Aderca
– Oameni în ceață (People in the Fog)
Ion Biberi
Agatha Christie
Death on the Nile
– Turning Wheels
Stuart Cloete
– O jumătate de om (Half a Man)
Ludovic Dauș
– Light Woman
Zona Gale
Anthony Gilbert
The Man Who Wasn't There
Katharine Hull and Pamela Whitlock –
The Far-Distant Oxus
(posthumously translated by Willa and Edwin Muir) – The Trial (first English translation of Der Process)
Franz Kafka
– Kalvaninn Kaadhali
Kalki Krishnamurthy
– Ljós heimsins (The Light of the World) – Part I, Heimsljós (World Light)
Halldór Laxness
Alexander Lernet-Holenia
– The Old Bunch
Meyer Levin
E. C. R. Lorac
Bats in the Belfry
Robert Prechtl – Titanic
Cecil Street
Death at the Club
Phoebe Atwood Taylor
Figure Away
Francis Brett Young
Portrait of a Village
May 13
Roch Carrier
August 19
Richard Ingrams
November 9
Roger McGough
December 22
David F. Case
February 19
Edward Garnett
– Edith Wharton (Edith Newbold Jones), American novelist and short-story writer (born 1862)
August 11
– Mykola Kulish, Ukrainian writer (shot with many other Ukrainian intellectuals at Sandarmokh, born 1892)[27]
November 3
– Mykola Zerov, Ukrainian poet, translator, classical and literary scholar and critic (shot at Sandarmokh, born 1890)[28]
November 3
– Myroslav Irchan, Ukrainian storywriter and playwright (shot at Sandarmokh, born 1897)[31]
November 3
– Florence Dugdale, English children's writer, widow of Thomas Hardy (cancer, born 1879)[32]
October 17
– Frances Nimmo Greene, American novelist, short story writer, children's writer, playwright (born 1867)
