This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1945.
Contents
Events
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 with Nazi Germany 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
Fiction
Ivo Andrić
The Bridge on the Drina (Na Drini Ćuprija)
Travnička hronika (Travnik Chronicle, Bosnian Chronicle, Bosnian Story, The Days of the Consuls)
Gospođica (The Young Lady, The Woman from Sarajevo)
Nigel Balchin – Mine Own Executioner
Charlotte Armstrong – The Innocent Flower
Banine – Caucasian days (Jours caucasiens)
Frans G. Bengtsson – The Long Ships (Röde Orm), part 2
Adolfo Bioy Casares – A Plan for Escape (Plan de evasión)
Robert Bloch – The Opener of the Way (anthology)
Arna Bontemps – Anyplace But Here
Victor Bridges – Trouble on the Thames
Hermann Broch – The Death of Virgil (Der Tod des Vergil)
Gwendolyn Brooks – A Street in Bronzeville
Gerald Butler – Mad with Much Heart
Taylor Caldwell – The Wide House
John Dickson Carr (as Carter Dickson) – The Curse of the Bronze Lamp
Winifred Carter – Princess Fitz
Vera Caspary – Bedelia
Children and young people
Rev. W. Awdry – The Three Railway Engines (first in 42 Railway Series books by Awdry and his son Christopher Awdry)
Selina Chönz and Alois Carigiet – Uorsin (Schellen-Ursli. Ein Engadiner Bilderbuch, translated as A Bell for Ursli)
Marguerite Henry – Justin Morgan Had a Horse
Tove Jansson – The Moomins and the Great Flood (Småtrollen och den stora översvämningen, first in the Moomin series of 14 books)
Jim Kjelgaard – Big Red
Ruth Krauss – The Carrot Seed
Robert Lawson – Rabbit Hill
Lois Lenski – Strawberry Girl
Astrid Lindgren – Pippi Longstocking (Pippi Långstrump, first in the Pippi Longstocking series of three full-length and six picture books)
E. B. White – Stuart Little
Drama
Jacinto Benavente – La infanzona
Mary Chase – Harvey
Warren Chetham-Strode – Young Mrs. Barrington
Campbell Christie and Dorothy Christie – Grand National Night
Eduardo De Filippo – Napoli milionaria (The Millions of Naples)
Norman Ginsbury – The First Gentleman
Jean Giraudoux (died 1944) – The Madwoman of Chaillot (La Folle de Chaillot)
Curt Goetz – The House in Montevideo (Das Haus in Montevideo)
Walter Greenwood – The Cure for Love
Arthur Laurents – Home of the Brave
John Perry – A Man About the House
Colin Morris – Desert Rats
J. B. Priestley – An Inspector Calls
Irwin Shaw – The Assassin
Edward Percy Smith – The Shop at Sly Corner
Lesley Storm – Great Day
Aimée Stuart – Lady from Edinburgh
Vernon Sylvaine – Madame Louise
Emlyn Williams – The Wind of Heaven
Poetry
Idris Davies – Tonypandy and other poems
Non-fiction
Ion Biberi – Lumea de mâine (World of Tomorrow)
Vannevar Bush – As We May Think
R. G. Collingwood – The Idea of Nature
Françoise Frenkel – Rien où poser sa tête (No Place to Lay One's Head)
Carlo Emilio Gadda – Eros e Priapo
Jacquetta Hawkes – Early Britain
Leonhard Huizinga – Six Candles for Indonesia (Zes kaarsen voor Indië)
Aldous Huxley – The Perennial Philosophy
Arthur Koestler – The Yogi and the Commissar and Other Essays
Carlo Levi – Christ Stopped at Eboli (Cristo si è fermato a Eboli)
C. S. Lewis – The Great Divorce (serialization concludes and book publication)
Betty MacDonald – The Egg and I
Maurice Merleau-Ponty – Phenomenology of Perception (Phénoménologie de la perception)
Karl Popper – The Open Society and Its Enemies
Bertrand Russell – A History of Western Philosophy And Its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day
Ernesto Sabato – One and the Universe (Uno y el Universo)
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. – The Age of Jackson
Births
January 3 – David Starkey, English historian
January 20 – Robert Olen Butler, American novelist and short story writer
January 30 – Michael Dorris, American writer (died 1997)
February 12 – David Small, American author and illustrator
February 13 - William Sleator, American science-fiction writer (died 2011)
February 23 – Robert Gray, Australian poet and critic (died 2025)
February 25 – Shiva Naipaul, Trinidad-born novelist (died 1985)
March 19 – Jim Turner, American literary editor (died 1999)
April 2 – Anne Waldman, American poet
April 16 – Sebastian Barker, English poet and journalist (died 2014)
April 27 – August Wilson, American playwright (died 2005)
April 30 – Annie Dillard, American poet and prose writer
June 11 – Robert Munsch, American-Canadian author and academic
June 13 – Whitley Strieber, American horror novelist
June 21 – Adam Zagajewski, Polish poet, novelist and essayist
July 5 – Michael Blake, American novelist and screenwriter (died 2015)
Deaths
January 13 – Margaret Deland, American novelist (born 1857)
January 15
Ursula Bethell, English-born New Zealand poet (born 1874)
Kate Simpson Hayes, Canadian playwright and legislative librarian (born 1856)
January 22 – Else Lasker-Schüler, German-born Jewish poet (born 1869)
January 27 – Antal Szerb, Hungarian writer (in concentration camp, born 1901)
February 6 – Robert Brasillach, French writer (executed, born 1909)
February 23 – Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy, Russian writer (born 1883)
c. March 12 – Anne Frank, German-born Dutch child diarist (probable typhus in concentration camp, born 1929)
March 15 – Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, French novelist (suicide, born 1893)
March 20 – Lord Alfred Douglas, English poet (born 1870)
March 31 – Maurice Donnay, French dramatist (born 1859)
April – Josef Čapek, Czech artist and writer (in concentration camp, born 1887)
April 9 – Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German theologian (hanged in concentration camp, born 1906)
May 2 – Friedo Lampe, German writer (shot, born 1899)
Awards
James Tait Black Memorial Prize:
Fiction: L. A. G. Strong, Travellers
Biography: D. S. MacColl, Philip Wilson Steer
Newbery Medal for children's literature: Robert Lawson, Rabbit Hill
Nobel Prize in Literature: Gabriela Mistral
Premio Nadal: José Félix Tapia, La luna ha entrado en casa
Prix Goncourt: Jean-Louis Bory, Mon village à l'heure allemande
Pulitzer Prize:
Drama: Mary Chase, Harvey
Poetry: Karl Shapiro, V-Letter and Other Poems
Novel: John Hersey, A Bell for Adano
Hugo Award:
Best Novella: Theodore Sturgeon, Killdozer!