This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1945.
Events
- January â In Paris, 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.
- c. January 1 â Jean-Paul Sartre refuses the Légion d'honneur.
- January 27 â Primo Levi is among those liberated from the Auschwitz concentration camp complex.
- February â Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is sentenced to eight years in a labour camp for criticizing Joseph Stalin.
- February 13âÂÂ15 â 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 OstÃ
Âe sledované vlaky (Closely Observed Trains, 1965) and Vonnegut's ' (1969).
- March 4 â Poet Pablo Neruda is elected a Chilean senator and officially joins the Communist Party of Chile four months later.
- March 8 â Federico GarcÃÂa Lorca's play The House of Bernarda Alba, completed just before his assassination in 1936, is first performed, in Buenos Aires.
- March 31 â 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.
- About end March â Jack Kerouac 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.
- May â The Estonian poet Heiti Talvik is deported to Siberia and never heard of again.
- May 2
- The expatriate American poet Ezra Pound is arrested by the Italian resistance movement and taken to its headquarters in Chiavari, but soon released as of no interest. On May 5, he turns himself in to the United States Army. He is held in a military detention camp outside Pisa, spending 25 days in an open cage before being given a tent. There he appears to suffer a nervous breakdown. While in the camp he drafts The Pisan Cantos.
- French novelist Colette is the first woman admitted to the Académie Goncourt.
- May 8 â The occupying powers in Allied-occupied Germany and Austria impose publishing curbs as part of denazification.
- June â Ern Malley hoax: 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.
- c. July â Theatre Workshop is formed in the north of England by Joan Littlewood, Ewan MacColl and other former members of Theatre Union as a touring company.
- August 17 â The allegorical dystopian novella Animal Farm by George Orwell, a satire on Stalinism, is first published by Fredric Warburg in London.
- September 11 â The Citizens Theatre opens in Glasgow under this name.
- September â J. B. Priestley's drama An Inspector Calls is premièred in Russian translation in Leningrad.
- October â The National Library of Korea is established in Seoul in the newly-liberated country, inheriting the Government-General of ChÃ
Âsen Library.
- October 29 â Vladimir Nabokov's 1940 application for U.S. citizenship is granted.
- November 1 â The U.S. magazine Ebony appears.
- November 21 â André Malraux is named Minister of Information by the new French President, Charles de Gaulle.
- November 26 â The U.K. film Brief Encounter, adapted from Noël Coward's short play Still Life, is released.
- November â Astrid Lindgren's children's book Pippi LÃÂ¥ngstrump, 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.
- December â Nag Hammadi library, a collection of Gnostic texts, is discovered in Upper Egypt.
- Canadian author Elizabeth Smart'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.
New books
Fiction
Children and young people
Drama
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Poetry
Non-fiction
Births
- January 3 â David Starkey, English historian
- January 20 â Robert Olen Butler, American novelist and short story writer
- January 30 â Michael Dorris, American writer (died 1997)
- February 12 â David Small, American author and illustrator
- February 13 - William Sleator, American science-fiction writer (died 2011)
- February 23 â Robert Gray, Australian poet and critic (died 2025)
- February 25 â Shiva Naipaul, Trinidad-born novelist (died 1985)
- March 19 â Jim Turner, American literary editor (died 1999)
- April 2 â Anne Waldman, American poet
- April 16 â Sebastian Barker, English poet and journalist (died 2014)
- April 27 â August Wilson, American playwright (died 2005)
- April 30 â Annie Dillard, American poet and prose writer
- June 11 â Robert Munsch, American-Canadian author and academic
- June 13 â Whitley Strieber, American horror novelist
- June 21 â Adam Zagajewski, Polish poet, novelist and essayist
- July 5 â Michael Blake, American novelist and screenwriter (died 2015)
- July 9 â Dean Koontz, American novelist
- July 12 â Remy Sylado (Yapi Panda Abdiel Tambayong), Indonesian writer
- July 21 â Wendy Cope, English poet
- July 25 - Joseph Delaney, English author (died 2022)
- July 30 â Patrick Modiano, French novelist, Nobel laureate
- September 1 â Mustafa Balel, Turkish author and translator
- October 15 â John Murrell, American-born dramatist
- November 5 â Richard Holmes, English literary biographer
- November 24 â Nuruddin Farah, Somali novelist
- December 17 â Jacqueline Wilson, English children's writer
- December 21 â Raymond E. Feist, American fantasy writer
- unknown dates
- Esther Croft, French Canadian novelist and short-story writer
- Rabai al-Madhoun, Palestinian writer
- Mari Strachan, Welsh novelist
- Mohamed Zafzaf, Moroccan novelist (died 2001)
Deaths
*Ursula Bethell, English-born New Zealand poet (born 1874)
*Kate Simpson Hayes, Canadian playwright and legislative librarian (born 1856)
- January 22 â Else Lasker-Schüler, German-born Jewish poet (born 1869)
- January 27 â Antal Szerb, Hungarian writer (in concentration camp, born 1901)
- February 6 â Robert Brasillach, French writer (executed, born 1909)
- February 23 â Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy, Russian writer (born 1883)
- c. March 12 â Anne Frank, German-born Dutch child diarist (probable typhus in concentration camp, born 1929)
- March 15 â Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, French novelist (suicide, born 1893)
- March 20 â Lord Alfred Douglas, English poet (born 1870)
- March 31 â Maurice Donnay, French dramatist (born 1859)
- April â Josef ÃÂapek, Czech artist and writer (in concentration camp, born 1887)
- April 9 â Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German theologian (hanged in concentration camp, born 1906)
- May 2 â Friedo Lampe, German writer (shot, born 1899)
- May 15 â Charles Williams, English author (born 1886)
- May 29 â Mihail Sebastian, Romanian Jewish playwright, essayist and novelist (road accident, born 1907)
- June 5 â Ilie BÃÂrbulescu, Romanian linguist and journalist (born 1873)
- June 8 â Robert Desnos, French poet (in concentration camp, born 1900)
- June 11 â Lurana W. Sheldon, American author and newspaper editor (born 1862)
- July 13 â Alla Nazimova, Crimean-born American scriptwriter and actress (born 1879)
- July 25 â Charles Gilman Norris, American novelist (born 1881)
- August 18 â E. R. Eddison, English fantasy writer (born 1882)
- August 20 â Alexander Roda Roda, Austro-Croatian-born novelist (born 1872)
- August 26 â Franz Werfel, Bohemian-born writer (born 1890)
- September 9 â Zinaida Gippius, émigré Russian writer (born 1869)
- September 21 â Ioan C. Filitti, Romanian historian, political theorist and essayist (born 1879)
- September 22 â Thomas Burke, English novelist and story writer (born 1886)
- October 8 â Felix Salten, Austrian-born children's writer (born 1869)
- November 21 â Robert Benchley, American humorist (born 1889)
- December 4 â Arthur Morrison, English writer (born 1863)
- December 14 - Maurice Baring, English poet and writer (born 1874)
- December 28 â Theodore Dreiser, American author (born 1871)
Awards
References