1945 in literature

Events

• January – In Paris, journalist and poet Robert Brasillach is tried and found guilty of "intelligence with the 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, Bohumil Hrabal's Ostře sledované vlaky and Vonnegut's .
• 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 opens on Broadway at the Playhouse Theatre, 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 – Australia's best-known literary hoax takes place is published the modernist magazine Angry Penguins: poems by a fictitious Ern Malley. The poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart created the verses from lines of other published work and then submitted them as purportedly by a recently deceased poet. The hoax is on Max Harris, the 22-year-old avant garde poet and critic who had founded Angry Penguins. Harris and his circle agree that an unknown modernist poet of great merit has come to light in suburban Australia. The Autumn 1944 edition with the poems comes out in mid-1945 due to wartime printing delays. An Australian newspaper reveals the hoax within weeks. McAuley and Stewart love early modernist poets, but despise later modernism, especially the well-funded Angry Penguins and 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 29 – Vladimir Nabokov's 1940 application for U.S. citizenship is granted.
• November 1 – The U.S. magazine Ebony appears.
• November 26 – The U.K. film Brief Encounter is adapted from Noël Coward's short play Still Life.
• 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 21 – André Malraux is named Minister of Information by the new French President, Charles de Gaulle.
• December – Nag Hammadi library, a collection of Gnostic texts, is discovered in Upper Egypt.

  New books

Fiction

• Ivo Andrić
• *The Bridge on the Drina
• *Travnička hronika
• *Gospođica
• Nigel Balchin – Mine Own Executioner
• Banine – Caucasian days
• Frans G. Bengtsson – The Long Ships, part 2
• Adolfo Bioy Casares – A Plan for Escape
• Robert Bloch – The Opener of the Way
• Arna Bontemps – Anyplace But Here
• Hermann Broch – The Death of Virgil
• Gwendolyn Brooks – A Street in Bronzeville
• Taylor Caldwell – The Wide House
• John Dickson Carr – The Curse of the Bronze Lamp
• Winifred Carter – Princess Fitz
• Vera Caspary – Bedelia
• Agatha Christie – Sparkling Cyanide
• Thomas B. Costain – The Black Rose
• Gertrude Crampton – Tootle
• Sergiu Dan – Unde începe noaptea
• Simone de Beauvoir – The Blood of Others
• August Derleth
• *
• *Something Near
• C. S. Forester – The Commodore
• Varian Fry – Surrender on Demand
• Julien Gracq – A Dark Stranger
• Winston Graham – The Forgotten Story
• Henry Green – Loving
• Chester Himes – If He Hollers Let Him Go
• – Six Candles for Indonesia
• Tove Jansson – The Moomins and the Great Flood
• Ruth Krauss – The Carrot Seed
• Margery Lawrence – Number Seven, Queer Street
• Robert Lawson – Rabbit Hill
• J. Sheridan Le Fanu – Green Tea and Other Ghost Stories
• C. S. Lewis – That Hideous Strength
• H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth – The Lurker at the Threshold
• Compton Mackenzie – The North Wind of Love, Book 2
• Hugh MacLennan – Two Solitudes
• Nancy Mitford – The Pursuit of Love
• R. K. Narayan – The English Teacher
• George Orwell – Animal Farm
• Gabrielle Roy – Bonheur d'occasion
• Jean-Paul Sartre – L'Âge de raison
• Elizabeth Smart – By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
• John Steinbeck – Cannery Row
• Noel Streatfeild – Saplings
• James Thurber – The Thurber Carnival
• Tarjei Vesaas – The House in the Dark
• Elio Vittorini – Uomini e no
• Mika Waltari – The Egyptian
• Evangeline Walton – Witch House
• Evelyn Waugh – Brideshead Revisited
• Charles Williams – All Hallows' Eve
• Cornell Woolrich – Night Has a Thousand Eyes

  Children and young people

• Rev. W. Awdry – Three Railway Engines
• Selina Chönz and Alois Carigiet – Uorsin
• Marguerite Henry – Justin Morgan Had a Horse
• Tove Jannson – The Moomins and the Great Flood
• Jim Kjelgaard – Big Red
• Ruth Krauss – The Carrot Seed
• Robert Lawson – Rabbit Hill
• Lois Lenski – Strawberry Girl
• Astrid Lindgren – Pippi Longstocking
• E. B. White – Stuart Little

  Drama