1941 in literature

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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
• Rafael Sabatini - Columbus
• 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
• Noël 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 (born 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 (born 1882)
• June 1 - Hugh Walpole, novelist
• June 15 - Evelyn Underhill, poet
• August 7 - Rabindranath Tagore, author (born 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