1932 in literature

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The year 1932 in literature involved some significant events and new books.

Events

• E. V. Knox replaces Sir Owen Seaman as editor of Punch magazine.
• Samuel Beckett's first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, is rejected by several publishers.
• W. B. Yeats rents a house in Dublin.
• The New Poetry (Thơ mới) period began, marked by an article and a poem of Phan Khôi, beginning Modern Literature in Vietnam.

New prose fiction

• Laura Adams Armer - Waterless Mountain
• Henry Bellamann - The Richest Woman in Town
• John Buchan - The Gap in the Curtain
• Pearl S. Buck - Sons
• Edgar Rice Burroughs - Tarzan Triumphant
• Erskine Caldwell - Tobacco Road
• Morley Callaghan - A Broken Journey
• John Dickson Carr
  • The Waxworks Murder
  • Poison In Jest
• Louis-Ferdinand Céline - Journey to the End of the Night
• Agatha Christie
  • Peril at End House
  • The Thirteen Problems
• Colette - The Pure and the Impure
• A. J. Cronin - Three Loves
• John Dos Passos - 1919
• William Faulkner - Light in August
• Lion Feuchtwanger - Josephus
• Rudolph Fisher - The Conjure Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem
• Elena Fortún - Celia en el colegio
• Lewis Grassic Gibbon - Sunset Song
• Stella Gibbons - Cold Comfort Farm
• Ellen Glasgow - The Sheltered Life
• Herman Hesse - Journey to the East
• Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
• Annabel Jackson - A Victorian Childhood
• W. Somerset Maugham - The Narrow Corner
• Nancy Mitford - Christmas Pudding
• Vladimir Nabokov
  • Glory
  • Laughter in the Dark
• Charles Nordhoff & James Norman Hall - Mutiny on the Bounty
• Anthony Powell - Venusberg
• Ellery Queen
  • The Greek Coffin Mystery
  • The Egyptian Cross Mystery
• Arthur Ransome - Peter Duck
• Joseph Roth - Radetzky March
• Damon Runyon - Guys and Dolls
• Dorothy L. Sayers - Have His Carcase
• Thorne Smith - Topper Takes a Trip
• John Steinbeck - The Pastures of Heaven
• Phoebe Atwood Taylor - Death Lights a Candle
• Wallace Thurman - Infants Of The Spring
• Sigrid Undset
  • Burning Bush
  • The Son Avenger
• Hugh Walpole - The Fortress
• Evelyn Waugh - Black Mischief
• Laura Ingalls Wilder - Little House in the Big Woods
• Charles Williams - The Greater Trumps

New drama

• Elias Canetti - The Wedding
• Noël Coward - Design for Living
• George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber - Dinner at Eight
• Marcel Pagnol - Fanny

Poetry

• W. H. Auden - The Orators
• Cecil Day-Lewis - From Feathers To Iron
• An "Objectivist's" Anthology
• Boris Pasternak - The Second Birth

Non-fiction

• Henri Bergson - Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion (The Two Sources of Morality and Religion)
• Bernard DeVoto - Mark Twain's America
• T. S. Eliot - Selected Essays, 1917-1932 (1932)

Births

Gay Talese

• January 18 - Robert Anton Wilson, author (died 2007)
• February 7 - Gay Talese, author
• February 16 - Aharon Appelfeld, novelist and poet
• March 18 - John Updike, novelist and poet (died 2009)
• March 31 - John Jakes, novelist
• May 7 - Jenny Joseph, poet
• June 5 - Christy Brown, My Left Foot author (died 1981)
• July 17 - Karla Kuskin, children's book author and illustrator (died 2009)
• August 16 - Christopher Okigbo, Nigerian poet (died 1967)
• August 17 - V. S. Naipaul, novelist
• September 7 - Malcolm Bradbury, novelist (died 2000)
• October 27 - Sylvia Plath, poet (died 1963)
• unknown date - Troy Kennedy Martin, scriptwriter

Deaths

• January 21 - Lytton Strachey, biographer
• February 10 - Edgar Wallace, crime writer
• March 16 - Harold Monro, poet
• April 20 - Giuseppe Peano, philosopher
• April 26 - Hart Crane, poet
• May 22 - Augusta, Lady Gregory, dramatist
• June 17 - Sir John Quick, politician and author
• July 6 - Kenneth Grahame, Wind in the Willows author
• July 20 - René Bazin, novelist
• July 22 - J. Meade Falkner, Moonfleet author
• November 23 - Henry S. Whitehead, American author

Awards

• James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: Helen de Guerry Simpson, Boomerang
• James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: Stephen Gwynn, The Life of Mary Kingsley
• Newbery Medal for children's literature: Laura Adams Armer, Waterless Mountain
• Nobel Prize for literature: John Galsworthy
• Pulitzer Prize for Drama: George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, Ira Gershwin, Of Thee I Sing
• Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: George Dillon: The Flowering Stone
• Pulitzer Prize for the Novel: Pearl S. Buck: The Good Earth