1941 in literature

The year 1941 in literature involved some significant events and new books.

Events

 * Frank Herbert marries Flora Parkinson.
 * F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished work, The Last Tycoon, is edited and published by Edmund Wilson.

New books

 * Margery Allingham - Traitor's Purse
 * William Attaway - Blood on the Forge
 * Frans Gunnar Bengtsson - The Long Ships (part 1)
 * Maurice Blanchot - Thomas l'obscure
 * Pearl S. Buck - China Sky
 * James M. Cain - Mildred Pierce
 * John Dickson Carr
 * The Case of the Constant Suicides
 * Death Turns the Tables
 * Seeing is Believing (as by Carter Dickson)
 * Joyce Cary - Herself Surprised
 * Agatha Christie
 * Evil Under the Sun
 * N or M?
 * A.J. Cronin - The Keys of the Kingdom
 * L. Sprague de Camp - Lest Darkness Fall (Complete novel)
 * August Derleth - Someone in the Dark
 * Walter D. Edmonds - The Matchlock Gun
 * F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Last Tycoon
 * Katheryn Campbell Graham - Under the Cottonwood
 * Robert A. Heinlein - Methuselah's Children
 * James Hilton - Random Harvest
 * C.S. Lewis - The Screwtape Letters
 * Janet Lewis - The Wife of Martin Guerre
 * Robert McCloskey - Make Way for Ducklings
 * Hugh MacLennan - Barometer Rising
 * W. Somerset Maugham - Up at the Villa
 * Oscar Micheaux - The Wind From Nowhere
 * Vladimir Nabokov - The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
 * Flann O'Brien - An Béal Bocht
 * E. Phillips Oppenheim - The Shy Plutocrat
 * Arthur Ransome - Missee Lee
 * H. A. Rey and Margret Rey - Curious George
 * Budd Schulberg - What Makes Sammy Run?
 * Anya Seton - My Theodosia
 * Armstrong Sperry - Call It Courage
 * Phoebe Atwood Taylor
 * The Perennial Boarder
 * The Hollow Chest (as by Alice Tilton)
 * Kylie Tennant - The Battlers
 * Eudora Welty - A Curtain of Green
 * Franz Werfel - The Song of Bernadette
 * Virginia Woolf - Between the Acts (posthumously)

New drama

 * Bertolt Brecht - Mother Courage and Her Children
 * Noel Coward - Blithe Spirit

Poetry

 * W.H. Auden - New Year Letter (British edition of 'The Double Man')
 * William Rose Benét - The Dust which is God
 * Laurence Binyon - The North Star and Other Poems
 * G.S. Fraser - The Fatal Landscape and Other Poems

Births

 * March 13 - Donella Meadows, Limits to Growth author
 * April 10 - Paul Theroux, novelist and travel writer
 * May 19 - Nora Ephron, novelist and screenwriter
 * June 5 - Spalding Gray, screenwriter and dramatist
 * June 27 - James P. Hogan, science fiction author
 * July 12 - John Lahr, author and critic
 * September 1 - Gwendolyn MacEwen, Canadian poet
 * October 2 - John Sinclair, poet
 * October 4 - Anne Rice, horror/fantasy writer
 * October 13 - John Snow, cricketer and poet
 * October 25 - Anne Tyler, novelist
 * October 27 - Gerd Brantenberg, Norwegian feminist author and gay rights activist
 * date unknown - Pepetela, novelist
 * date unknown - Miles Kington, journalist

Deaths

 * January 4 - Henri Bergson, writer
 * January 6 - F. R. Higgins, poet
 * January 13 - James Joyce, writer (b. 1882)
 * January 23 - John Oxenham, novelist and poet
 * February 7 - Banjo Paterson, poet
 * February 9 - Elizabeth von Arnim, novelist
 * March 13 - Elizabeth Madox Roberts, novelist and poet
 * March 28 - Virginia Woolf, author (b. 1882)
 * June 1 - Hugh Walpole, novelist
 * June 15 - Evelyn Underhill, poet
 * August 7 - Rabindranath Tagore, author (b. 1861)
 * November 18 – Émile Nelligan, poet

Awards

 * Carnegie Medal for children's literature: Mary Treadgold, We Couldn't Leave Dinah
 * Frost Medal: Robert Frost
 * James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: Joyce Cary, A House of Children
 * James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: John Gore, King George V
 * Newbery Medal for children's literature: Armstrong Sperry, Call It Courage
 * Nobel Prize for literature: not awarded
 * Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Robert E. Sherwood, There Shall Be No Night
 * Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Leonard Bacon: Sunderland Capture
 * Pulitzer Prize for the Novel: no award given