1945 in literature
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1945.
January – In , journalist and poet Robert Brasillach is tried and found guilty of "intelligence with the (German) enemy" during World War II, sparking a major dispute in French society over collaboration and clemency.[1]
Paris
February – is sentenced to eight years in a labour camp for criticizing Joseph Stalin.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
–15 – The bombing of Dresden in World War II is seen by the German Jewish diarist Victor Klemperer, the novelist Kurt Vonnegut as an American prisoner of war, and Miles Tripp as a British bomb aimer. It will feature in Józef Mackiewicz's novel Sprawa pulkownika Miasojedowa (Colonel Miasoyedov's Case, 1962), Bohumil Hrabal's Ostře sledované vlaky (Closely Observed Trains, 1965) and Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (1969).
February 13
– Poet Pablo Neruda is elected a Chilean senator and officially joins the Communist Party of Chile four months later.
March 4
– Federico García Lorca's play The House of Bernarda Alba, completed just before his assassination in 1936, is first performed, in Buenos Aires.
March 8
– Tennessee Williams' semi-autobiographical "memory play" The Glass Menagerie (1944, adapted from a short story) opens on Broadway at the Playhouse Theatre (New York City), starring Laurette Taylor and winning the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award.[2]
March 31
About end March – and William S. Burroughs complete their mystery novel And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a fictionalization of manslaughter committed in 1944 by their friend Lucien Carr, but it will not appear fully until 2008.[3]
Jack Kerouac
May 2
Ezra Pound
– The occupying powers in Allied-occupied Germany and Austria impose publishing curbs as part of denazification.[5]
May 8
June – : Australia's most celebrated literary hoax takes place when Angry Penguins is published with poems by the fictional Ern Malley. Poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart created the poems from lines of other published work and then sent them as the purported work of a recently deceased poet. The hoax is played on Max Harris, at this time a 22-year-old avant garde poet and critic who had started the modernist magazine Angry Penguins. Harris and his circle of literary friends agreed that a hitherto completely unknown modernist poet of great merit had come to light in suburban Australia. The Autumn 1944 edition of the magazine with the poems comes out in mid-1945 due to wartime printing delays with cover illustration by Sidney Nolan. An Australian newspaper uncovers the hoax within weeks. McAuley and Stewart loved early Modernist poets but despise later modernism and especially the well-funded Angry Penguins and are jealous of Harris's precocious success.[6]
Ern Malley hoax
c. July – is formed in the north of England by Joan Littlewood, Ewan MacColl and other former members of Theatre Union as a touring company.
Theatre Workshop
– The allegorical dystopian novella Animal Farm by George Orwell, a satire on Stalinism, is first published by Fredric Warburg in London.
August 17
September – 's drama An Inspector Calls is premièred in Russian translation in Leningrad.[7]
J. B. Priestley
– André Malraux is named Minister of Information by the new French President, Charles de Gaulle.[9]
November 21
– The U.K. film Brief Encounter, adapted from Noël Coward's short play Still Life, is released.
November 26
November – 's children's book Pippi Långstrump, with illustrations by Ingrid Vang Nyman, is published in Sweden by Rabén & Sjögren, having won a competition run by the publisher for children's books in August. It introduces an anarchic child heroine. An English translation appears as Pippi Longstocking.
Astrid Lindgren
Canadian author 's novel in prose poetry By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept is published in London (U.K.); the writer's mother Louise leads a successful campaign with government officials to have the book banned in Canada, buying up as many copies as she can find of those that make their way into the country and having them burned.[11]
Elizabeth Smart
Ivo Andrić
The Bridge on the Drina
– A Plan for Escape (Plan de evasión)
Adolfo Bioy Casares
– Anyplace But Here
Arna Bontemps
– Trouble on the Thames
Victor Bridges
– A Street in Bronzeville
Gwendolyn Brooks
– The Wide House
Taylor Caldwell
Peter Cheyney
I'll Say She Does
– Unde începe noaptea
Sergiu Dan
August Derleth
"In Re: Sherlock Holmes" – The Adventures of Solar Pons
– Surrender on Demand
Varian Fry
– So Well Remembered
James Hilton
– Bonheur d'occasion (The Tin Flute)
Gabrielle Roy
– The Thurber Carnival (anthology)
James Thurber
– Uomini e no (Men and not Men)
Elio Vittorini
– All Hallows' Eve
Charles Williams
unknown dates