The year 1946 in literature involved some significant events and new books.
Events[]
- January – Launch in the United Kingdom of Penguin Classics under the editorship of E. V. Rieu, whose translation of the Odyssey is the first published in the series[1] and will be the country's best-selling book over the next decade.[2]
- January 5 – Estonian writer Jaan Kross is arrested and imprisoned by the occupying Soviet authorities.
- May 20 – W. H. Auden becomes a United States citizen.[3]
- May 22 – George Orwell leaves London to spend much of the next 18 months on the Scottish island of Jura, working on his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (known at an earlier stage in its composition as The Last Man in Europe). This year his Animal Farm becomes book of the year in the United States.
- August 18 – Assamese poet Amulya Barua is killed aged 24 in communal violence while studying at the University of Calcutta; his only collection of poems, Achina("The Stranger"), is published posthumously.
- October 1 – English première of J. B. Priestley's drama An Inspector Calls at the New Theatre, London, starring Ralph Richardson.[4]
- November 7 – Walker Percy marries Mary Bernice Townsend.
- November 8 – Christopher Isherwood becomes a United States citizen.
- December 18 – Damon Runyon's ashes are scattered over New York City from an airplane piloted by Eddie Rickenbacker.
- December 23 – Giovannino Guareschi publishes the first story about the priest Don Camillo in his magazine Candido.
- December 26 – David Lean's film of Great Expectations is released in England.
- August Aimé Balkema publishes his first book in South Africa, Vyjtig Gedigte by the poet C. Louis Leipoldt.[5]
- Frederick Buechner receives a Bachelor of Arts degree from Princeton University.
- Poet Ezra Pound brought back to the United States on treason charges, but found unfit to face trial because of insanity and sent to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he remains for 12 years.
- English novelist T. H. White settles on Alderney in the Channel Islands.