1949 in literature

Events

• January 11 – Bertolt Brecht's play Mother Courage and Her Children , 1939, is first performed in Germany, at the Deutsches Theater in East Berlin, with his wife Helene Weigel in the title role and staged with his Verfremdungseffekt. This marks the origin of the Berliner Ensemble.
• January 31 – The radio series Book at Bedtime begins on the U.K. BBC Light Programme with a reading of John Buchan's novel The Three Hostages.
• February 10 – Arthur Miller's tragedy Death of a Salesman opens at the Morosco Theatre on Broadway in New York City with Lee J. Cobb in the title rôle of Willy Loman. It will run for 742 performances.
• March – Poet Pablo Neruda flees Chile over the Lilpela Pass through the Andes to Argentina on horseback carrying a manuscript of his Canto General.
• April 14
• *Roy Campbell punches Stephen Spender on the nose at a poetry reading in London.
• *N'Ko alphabet devised by Solomana Kante as a writing system and literary language for the Manding languages of West Africa.
• May – Welsh poet Dylan Thomas and his wife Caitlin settle at the Boat House, Laugharne, in South Wales.
• June 8 – George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is published in London by Secker & Warburg.
• June – Oxford University Dramatic Society production of Shakespeare's The Tempest beside Worcester College lake, directed by Nevill Coghill.
• Summer
• *The first Cheltenham Literature Festival is held in England, so making it the longest-running event of its kind in the world.
• *Street & Smith ceases to publish its pulp magazines in the United States.
• October 5 – American writer Helene Hanff writes her first letter from New York City to the London antiquarian book dealers Marks & Co, a correspondence eventually collected as 84, Charing Cross Road.
• October 13 – George Orwell marries Sonia Brownell while confined in University College Hospital, London, where he will die three months later.

• Arthur C. Clarke becomes an assistant editor of Science Abstracts.
• Radclyffe Hall's lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness, convicted of obscenity in the United Kingdom on first publication in 1928, is republished here posthumously by Falcon Press, with no legal challenge made against it.
• Jean-Paul Sartre completes his Les Chemins de la Liberté trilogy.
• The Théâtre du Rideau Vert is founded in Montreal by Yvette Brind'Amour and Mercedes Palominohere, as the first professional French-language theatre in Canada.
• A statue of the folk poet Larin Paraske is erected in Helsinki.
• Enid Blyton's children's books – Little Noddy Goes to Toyland, the first to introduce the title character, and The Secret Seven, first in the eponymous series – are published in the UK.

  New books

Fiction

• Ilse Aichinger – "Spiegelgeschichte"
• Nelson Algren – The Man with the Golden Arm
• Miguel Ángel Asturias – Men of Maize
• Nigel Balchin – A Sort of Traitors
• Antoine Blondin – L'Europe buissonnière
• Heinrich Böll – The Train Was on Time
• Jorge Luis Borges – The Aleph , short stories
• Paul Bowles – The Sheltering Sky
• Fredric Brown – The Screaming Mimi
• Pearl S. Buck – The Angry Wife
• Dorothy Bussy – Olivia
• Taylor Caldwell – Let Love Come Last
• Italo Calvino – The Crow Comes Last , short stories
• Victor Canning – The Golden Salamander
• Alejo Carpentier – The Kingdom of this World
• John Dickson Carr
• *Below Suspicion
• *A Graveyard To Let
• Agatha Christie – Crooked House
• H. F. Ellis – The Papers of A. J. Wentworth B. A.
• Foster Fitzsimmons – Bright Leaf
• Winston Graham – Cordelia
• Graham Greene – The Third Man
• A. B. Guthrie, Jr. – The Way West
• Knut Hamsun – On Overgrown Paths
• John Hawkes – Cannibal
• Alfred Hayes – The Girl on the Via Flaminia
• William Heinesen – The Black Cauldron
• Marguerite Henry – King of the Wind
• Georgette Heyer – Arabella
• Hammond Innes – The White South
• Shirley Jackson – The Lottery and Other Stories
• Alaric Jacob – Scenes from a Bourgeois Life
• Dagmar Lange – Mördaren ljuger inte ensam
• Marghanita Laski – Little Boy Lost
• H. P. Lovecraft – Something About Cats and Other Pieces
• Ana María Matute – Luciérnagas
• Robert Merle – Week-end at Zuydcoote
• Yukio Mishima – Confessions of a Mask
• Nancy Mitford – Love in a Cold Climate
• C. L. Moore – Beyond Earth's Gates
• Stratis Myrivilis – :el:Η Παναγιά η Γοργόνα|Η Παναγιά η Γοργόνα
• Máirtín Ó Cadhain – Cré na Cille
• John O'Hara – A Rage to Live
• George Orwell – Nineteen Eighty-Four
• Karel Poláček – There Were Five of Us
• Samuel Putnam – Don Quixote
• Ellery Queen – Cat of Many Tails
• Harold Robbins – The Dream Merchants
• Jack Schaefer – Shane
• Anna Seghers – The Dead Stay Young
• Nevil Shute – A Town Like Alice
• Emma Smith – The Far Cry
• Rex Stout
• *The Second Confession
• *Trouble in Triplicate
• Edward Streeter – Father of the Bride
• Gwyn Thomas – All Things Betray Thee
• Arved Viirlaid – Tormiaasta
• Mika Waltari – The Wanderer
• S. Fowler Wright – The Throne of Saturn
• Frank Yerby – Pride's Castle

  Children and young people

• Marguerite de Angeli – The Door in the Wall
• Enid Blyton
• *Noddy Goes to Toyland
• *The Secret Seven
• *The Rockingdown Mystery
• Ruby Ferguson – Jill's Gymkhana
• Janet and John
• Astrid Lindgren – Most Beloved Sister
• Clare Mallory – Juliet Overseas
• Ruth Park – Poor Man's Orange
• Willard Price – Amazon Adventure
• H. E. Todd – Bobby Brewster and the Winkers' Club
• Geoffrey Trease – No Boats on Bannermere
• Meriol Trevor – The Forest and the Kingdom

  Drama