1930 in literature

The year 1930 in literature involved some significant events and new books.

Events

• January 6 - The first literary character licensing agreement is signed by A. A. Milne, granting Stephen Slesinger U.S. and Canadian merchandising rights to the Winnie-the-Pooh works.
• July 14 - Luigi Pirandello's The Man With the Flower in His Mouth becomes the first-ever broadcast television drama.
• November 5 - Sinclair Lewis is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
• John Masefield becomes Poet Laureate of the UK.
• A Boston, Massachusetts court bans Theodore Dreiser's novel An American Tragedy (1925) as "obscene".
• Agatha Christie marries archaeologist Max Mallowan.

New prose fiction

• Vicki Baum - Grand Hotel
• Pearl S. Buck - East Wind: West Wind
• John Dickson Carr - It Walks By Night
• Leslie Charteris - Enter the Saint
• Agatha Christie
  • The Murder at the Vicarage
  • The Mysterious Mr. Quin
  • Giant's Bread (as by Mary Westmacott)
• Albert Cohen - Solal of the Solals
• John Dos Passos - The 42nd Parallel
• William Faulkner - As I Lay Dying
• Rachel Field - Hitty, Her First Hundred Years
• Zona Gale - Bridal Pond
• Dashiell Hammett - The Maltese Falcon
• Hermann Hesse - Narcissus and Goldmund
• Georgette Heyer - Powder and Patch
• Sydney Horler - Checkmate
• Langston Hughes - Not Without Laughter
• Carolyn Keene - The Secret of the Old Clock
• Oliver La Farge - Laughing Boy
• D. H. Lawrence - The Virgin and the Gypsy
• W. Somerset Maugham - Cakes and Ale
• André Malraux - The Royal Way (La Voie Royale)
• André Maurois - Fattypuffs and Thinifers (Patapoufs et Filifers)
• George A. Moore
  • Aphrodite in Aulis
  • A Flood
• Vladimir Nabokov
  • The Defense
  • The Eye
• Irène Némirovsky - Le Bal
• Camil Petrescu - Ultima noapte de dragoste, întâia noapte de război (The Last Night of Love, the First Night of War)
• Watty Piper - The Little Engine That Could
• J. B. Priestley - Angel Pavement
• Ellery Queen - The French Powder Mystery
• Ayn Rand - Anthem
• Elizabeth Madox Roberts - The Great Meadow
• Joseph Roth - Job
• Arthur Ransome - Swallows and Amazons
• Dorothy L. Sayers
  • Strong Poison
  • The Documents in the Case (written with Robert Eustace)
• Upton Sinclair - Mental Radio
• Olaf Stapledon - Last and First Men
• Miguel de Unamuno - San Manuel Bueno, Mártir
• Hugh Walpole - Rogue Herries
• Evelyn Waugh - Vile Bodies
• Thornton Wilder - The Woman of Andros
• Philip Gordon Wylie - Gladiator

New drama

• Antoine Bibesco - Ladies All
• Bertolt Brecht - Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and The Decision
• Ferdinand Bruckner - Elisabeth of England
• Marc Connelly - The Green Pastures
• Noël Coward - Private Lives
• Geoffrey Kerr - London Calling
• Federico García Lorca - The Public and The Shoemaker's Prodigious Wife

Poetry

• W. H. Auden - Poems
• T. S. Eliot - Ash Wednesday
• William Empson - Seven Types of Ambiguity

Non-fiction

• Muhammad Iqbal - The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam
• Edouard de Pomiane - Cuisine en dix minutes
• W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman - 1066 and All That
• Owen Wister - Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship

Births

• January 23 - Derek Walcott, author
• February 17 - Ruth Rendell, writer
• March 8 - Douglas Hurd, politician and novelist
• July 15 - Jacques Derrida, literary critic (died 2004)
• August 17 - Ted Hughes, poet (died 1998)
• September 25 - Shel Silverstein, poet (died 1999)
• October 10 - Harold Pinter, playwright (died 2008)
• November 1 - A. R. Gurney, dramatist
• November 5 - Clifford Irving, literary forger
• November 16 - Chinua Achebe, Nigerian writer, academic, and literary critic
• November 18 - J. G. Ballard, author (died 2009)

Deaths

• January 16 - Johannes Gillhoff, German writer and educator (born 1861)
• February 27 - George Haven Putnam, American author, publisher
• March 2 - D. H. Lawrence, novelist and poet (born 1885)
• March 11 - Edward Franklin Albee II, theatre impresario (born 1857)
• March 12 - Alois Jirásek, novelist and dramatist
• April 21 - Robert Bridges, Poet Laureate (born 1844)
• April 14 - Vladimir Mayakovsky, Russian poet (born 1893)
• April 22 - Jeppe Aakjær, Danish poet and novelist (born 1866)
• May 17 - Herbert Croly, political writer
• June 9 - Arthur St. John Adcock, novelist
• June 23 - Israel Gollancz, Shakespeare scholar (born 1864)
• July 7 - Arthur Conan Doyle, British author and creator of Sherlock Holmes (born 1859)
• August 29 - William Archibald Spooner, originator of the "spoonerism" (born 1844)
• September - Karam Singh, Sikh historian (born 1884)
• September 4 - Vladimir Arsenyev, explorer and travel writer (born 1872)
• date unknown
  • Sigurd Ibsen, politician and writer, son of Henrik Ibsen
  • Maria Polydouri, Greek poet (born 1902)

Awards

• James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: E. H. Young, Miss Mole
• James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: Francis Yeats-Brown, Lives of a Bengal Lancer
• Newbery Medal for children's literature: Rachel Field, Hitty, Her First Hundred Years
• Nobel Prize for Literature: Sinclair Lewis
• Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Marc Connelly, The Green Pastures
• Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Conrad Aiken: Selected Poems
• Pulitzer Prize for the Novel: Oliver La Farge - Laughing Boy