1947 in literature

Events

• January – The English actor-manager Geoffrey Kendal arrives in British India with his touring repertory theatre company "Shakespeareana." It will perform Shakespeare in towns and villages there for several decades.
• January 29 – Arthur Miller's play All My Sons opens at the Coronet Theater in New York, directed by Elia Kazan and starring Ed Begley, as the writer's first Broadway success.
• February 17 – On the death of Montserrat-born British fantasy fiction writer M. P. Shiel aged 81 in Chichester, his supposed title to the Kingdom of Redonda passes to the London poet John Gawsworth.
• March – Landfall, a literary magazine, is founded by Charles Brasch and first published by Caxton Press. It will become the country's longest-established literary journal.
• April
• *The opening night of the Swiss dramatist Friedrich Dürrenmatt's first play, Es steht geschrieben, is held in the Schauspielhaus Zürich, provoking fights among the audience.
• *The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Qumran Caves becomes public.
• April 6 – The 1st Tony Awards for excellence in live American theater are awarded at the Waldorf Astoria New York.
• May – Dorothy Parker divorces Alan Campbell for the first time.
• May/June – The English novelist T. H. White buys a house in Saint Anne, Alderney in the Channel Islands, where he will spend the rest of his life.
• June – Publication begins of Vice Versa magazine in Los Angeles, the first known periodical for lesbians, edited by 'Lisa Ben'.
• June 24 – Kenneth Arnold claims to have seen nine flying saucers near Mount Rainier, Washington, starting a wave of enthusiasm in science fiction writers and scientists.
• June 25 – Most of The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank is first published as Het Achterhuis: Dagboekbrieven 14 juni 1942 – 1 augustus 1944 in Amsterdam, two years after its writer's death in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
• July – Jack Kerouac begins the journey he will later chronicle in his book On the Road.
• August 24 – The first Edinburgh Festival of the Arts opens in Scotland.
• September – The German literary association Group 47 forms.
• September 12 – The American novelist John Dos Passos is involved in an automobile accident that kills his wife and costs him the sight in one eye.
• November – Muriel Spark becomes editor of Poetry Review in London from this month's issue.
• November 24 – Dalton Trumbo refuses to testify before the McCarthyite House Un-American Activities Committee. Ring Lardner, Jr. attends, but refuses to answer questions. The United States House of Representatives votes 346–17 to approve citations of Contempt of Congress against all the "Hollywood Ten" screenwriters and directors who refuse to cooperate with the Committee over allegations of communist influences in the movie business. The ten are blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studios the following day.
• December 23 – Tennessee Williams' play A Streetcar Named Desire opens at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway in New York City, directed by Elia Kazan. It stars Jessica Tandy and Marlon Brando in his first major stage rôle.

• Woody Guthrie completes his novel House of Earth. It will not be published until 2013.
• Séamus Ó Néill's novel Tonn Tuile is the first book from the Irish language publisher Sáirséal agus Dill in Dublin.
• Pramoedya Ananta Toer begins two years' imprisonment by the Dutch authorities in Jakarta for supporting the Indonesian National Revolution. While in prison he begins his first major novel, Perburuan.

  New books

Fiction

• Nelson Algren – The Neon Wilderness
• Cynthia Asquith – This Mortal Coil
• Carolyn Sherwin Bailey – Miss Hickory
• Nigel Balchin – Lord, I Was Afraid
• François Boyer – Les Jeux inconnus
• Ray Bradbury – Dark Carnival
• John Horne Burns – The Gallery
• Italo Calvino – The Path to the Nest of Spiders
• Albert Camus – The Plague
• John Dickson Carr
• *The Sleeping Sphinx
• *Dr. Fell, Detective, and Other Stories
• Agatha Christie – The Labours of Hercules
• Thomas B. Costain – The Moneyman
• Johan Daisne – The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short
• Hans Fallada – Every Man Dies Alone
• Jean Genet – Querelle de Brest
• Jean Giono – Un Roi sans divertissement
• Winston Graham – Take My Life
• Robert A. Heinlein – Rocket Ship Galileo
• Dorothy B. Hughes – In a Lonely Place
• Hammond Innes
• *Killer Mine
• *The Lonely Skier
• Carl Jacobi – Revelations in Black
• Yasunari Kawabata – Snow Country
• Jacques Laurent – Darling Caroline
• Fritz Leiber, Jr. – Night's Black Agents
• Alexander Lernet-Holenia – Twentieth of July
• Malcolm Lowry – Under the Volcano
• Thomas Mann – Doctor Faustus
• Gabriel García Márquez – Eyes of a Blue Dog
• W. Somerset Maugham – Creatures of Circumstance
• Oscar Micheaux – Masquerade, a Historical Novel
• James A. Michener – Tales of the South Pacific
• W. O. Mitchell – Who Has Seen the Wind?
• Alberto Moravia – The Woman of Rome
• Willard Motley – Knock On Any Door
• Vladimir Nabokov – Bend Sinister
• Cesare Pavese – Il compagno
• Gerard Reve – De Avonden
• Kenneth Roberts – Lydia Bailey
• Michael Sadleir – Forlorn Sunset
• Samuel Shellabarger – Prince of Foxes
• Mickey Spillane – I, the Jury
• John Steinbeck
• *The Pearl
• *The Wayward Bus
• Rex Stout – Too Many Women
• Phoebe Atwood Taylor – The Iron Clew
• Philip Toynbee – Tea with Mrs Goodman
• Boris Vian
• *Autumn in Peking
• *Froth on the Daydream
• * – The Dead All Have the Same Skin
• Evelyn Waugh
• *Scott-King's Modern Europe
• Jack Williamson – With Folded Hands

  Children and young people

• Dora Birtles – Pioneer Shack
• William Pène du Bois – The Twenty-One Balloons
• Margaret Wise Brown – Goodnight Moon
• Edgar Rice Burroughs – Tarzan and the Foreign Legion
• Nan Chauncy – They Found a Cave
• Rumer Godden – The Doll's House
• Clare Hoskyns-Abrahall – Prelude
• James Lennox Kerr – Dauntless Finds Her Crew
• Betty MacDonald – Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle
• Walter de la Mare – Collected Stories for Children
• Laurence Meynell – The Old Gang
• Arthur Ransome – Great Northern?
• Frank Richards – Billy Bunter of Greyfriars School
• Charles Green Shaw – It Looked Like Spilt Milk

  Drama