1954 in literature

Events

• January – Kingsley Amis's first novel, the comic campus novel Lucky Jim, is published by Victor Gollancz Ltd in London.
• January 7 – The Georgetown–IBM experiment is the first public demonstration of a machine translation system, held in New York at the IBM head office.
• January 25 – Dylan Thomas's radio play Under Milk Wood is first broadcast in the U.K. on the BBC Third Programme, two months after its author's death, with Richard Burton as "First Voice".
• February – The London Magazine is revived as a literary magazine, with John Lehmann as editor.
• March 31 – A. L. Zissu is sentenced in Bucharest to life imprisonment for "conspiring against the social order". This has been a focal point in the anti-Zionist clampdown in Communist Romania.
• May 29 – The rediscovered and restored early 17th-century Corral de comedias de Almagro in Spain is re-inaugurated with a play by Calderon de la Barca.
• June 16 – The first public celebration of "Bloomsday" takes place in Dublin: writers Flann O'Brien, Patrick Kavanagh and Anthony Cronin travel in a horse-drawn coach, stopping at numerous bars to retrace the steps of the characters from James Joyce's novel Ulysses.
• June 22 – In the Parker–Hulme murder case, the 15-year-old Julia Hulme, a future writer of English historical detective fiction as Anne Perry, takes part in the murder of her best friend's mother in Christchurch, New Zealand.
• July – The first volume of J. R. R. Tolkien's epic The Lord of the Rings – The Fellowship of the Ring – is published in London by George Allen & Unwin. The Two Towers follows on November 11 and publication will be completed in 1955. By 2007, 150 million copies will have been sold worldwide.
• September 1 – Lawrence Quincy Mumford becomes the U.S.Librarian of Congress.
• September 17 – William Golding's first novel, the allegorical dystopian Lord of the Flies, is published by Faber and Faber in London.
• September 22 – Terence Rattigan's two linked plays Separate Tables is first performed, at St James's Theatre, London.
• November 19 – Brendan Behan's first play, The Quare Fellow is premièred at the Pike Theatre, Dublin.

• Jack Kerouac reads Dwight Goddard's A Buddhist Bible, which will influence him greatly.
• John Updike graduates from Harvard with a thesis on George Herbert. This summer he begins a year's Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship to the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at England's University of Oxford. His first story for The New Yorker, "Friends from Philadelphia", appears on October 30.

  New books

Fiction

• Kingsley Amis – Lucky Jim
• Poul Anderson – The Broken Sword
• Isaac Asimov – The Caves of Steel
• James Baldwin – Go Tell It on the Mountain
• Hamilton Basso – The View from Pompey's Head
• John Bingham – The Third Skin
• Boileau-Narcejac – The Living and the Dead
• Lucy M. Boston – Yew Hall
• Pierre Boulle – The Bridge over the River Kwai
• Taylor Caldwell – Never Victorious, Never Defeated
• John Dickson Carr
• *The Third Bullet and Other Stories
• *The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes
• Agatha Christie – Destination Unknown
• Robertson Davies – Leaven of Malice
• Simone de Beauvoir – The Mandarins
• Daphne du Maurier – Mary Anne
• Ian Fleming – Live and Let Die
• Max Frisch – I'm Not Stiller
• William Golding – Lord of the Flies
• Hergé – Explorers on the Moon
• Hwang Sun-won – The Descendants of Cain
• Mac Hyman – No Time for Sergeants
• Hammond Innes – The Strange Land
• Randall Jarrell – Pictures from an Institution: a comedy
• Yasunari Kawabata – The Sound of the Mountain
• Frances Parkinson Keyes – The Royal Box
• Kalki Krishnamurthy
• *Amara Thara
• *Ponniyin Selvan
• Manuel Mujica Láinez – La casa
• Jacques Laurent – Mata Hari's Daughter
• Camara Laye – Le Regard du roi
• Ira Levin – A Kiss Before Dying
• Astrid Lindgren – Mio, My Son
• Compton Mackenzie – Ben Nevis Goes East
• Kamala Markandaya – Nectar in a Sieve
• John Masters – Bhowani Junction
• Richard Matheson – I Am Legend
• John Metcalfe – The Feasting Dead
• James A. Michener – Sayonara
• Paul Morand – Hecate and Her Dogs
• Alberto Moravia – Il disprezzo
• Iris Murdoch – Under the Net
• Louis Pauwels – L'Amour monstre
• J. B. Priestley – The Magicians
• Marcel Proust – Jean Sauteuil
• Ellery Queen – The Glass Village
• Pauline Réage – Story of O
• Mordecai Richler – The Acrobats
• Lillian Roth – I'll Cry Tomorrow
• Françoise Sagan – Bonjour Tristesse
• Ahmed Sefrioui – La Boîte à merveilles
• Anya Seton – Katherine
• Margit Söderholm – Clouds Over Hellesta
• John Steinbeck – Sweet Thursday
• Irving Stone – Love Is Eternal
• Rex Stout
• *The Black Mountain
• *Three Men Out
• Edward Streeter – Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation
• Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar – Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü
• Morton Thompson – Not as a Stranger
• J. R. R. Tolkien
• *The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
• *The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
• Amos Tutuola – My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
• Tarjei Vesaas – Spring Night
• Gore Vidal – Messiah
• Douglass Wallop – The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant
• Monique Watteau – La Colère végétale
• Frank Yerby – Benton's Row

  Children and young people

• Viola Bayley – Paris Adventure
• Lucy M. Boston – The Children of Green Knowe
• Eleanor Cameron – The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet
• Meindert DeJong – The Wheel on the School
• Rumer Godden – Impunity Jane: The Story of a Pocket Doll
• Joseph Krumgold – ...And Now Miguel
• C. S. Lewis – The Horse and His Boy
• Dr. Seuss – Horton Hears a Who!
• Rosemary Sutcliff – The Eagle of the Ninth
• Henry Treece
• *Legions of the Eagle
• *The Eagles Have Flown
• Ronald Welch – Knight Crusader

  Drama