• January – 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 –
Jean-Paul Sartre refuses the
Légion d'honneur. •
January 27 –
Primo Levi is among those liberated from the
Auschwitz concentration camp complex. • February –
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is sentenced to eight years in a labour camp for criticizing
Joseph Stalin. •
February 13–
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). •
March 4 – Poet
Pablo Neruda is elected a
Chilean senator and officially joins the
Communist Party of Chile four months later. •
March 8 –
Federico García Lorca's play
The House of Bernarda Alba, completed just before his assassination in
1936, is first performed, in
Buenos Aires. •
March 31 –
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 –
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 – 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 – The
occupying powers in
Allied-occupied Germany and
Austria impose publishing curbs as part of
denazification. • June –
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 –
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 – The
allegorical dystopian
novella Animal Farm by
George Orwell, a satire on
Stalinism, is first published by
Fredric Warburg in London. •
September 11 – The
Citizens Theatre opens in
Glasgow under this name. • September –
J. B. Priestley's drama
An Inspector Calls is premièred in Russian translation in
Leningrad. • October – The
National Library of Korea is established in
Seoul in the newly-liberated country, inheriting the
Government-General of Chōsen Library. •
October 29 –
Vladimir Nabokov's 1940 application for U.S. citizenship is granted. •
November 1 – The U.S. magazine
Ebony appears. •
November 21 –
André Malraux is named Minister of Information by the new French President,
Charles de Gaulle. •
November 26 – The U.K. film
Brief Encounter, adapted from
Noël Coward's short play
Still Life, is released. • November –
Astrid Lindgren'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. • December –
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==