1928 in literature

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This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1928.

Events

Stockholm Public Library

• January
  • Mikhail Sholokhov's novel And Quiet Flows the Don («Тихий Дон») begins serialization in the Soviet magazine Oktyabr.
  • Ford Madox Ford publishes Last Post in the U.K., last in his World War I tetralogy Parade's End published since 1924.
• March 31 – Stockholm Public Library, designed by Gunnar Asplund, is opened.
• April 19 – Publication of the Oxford English Dictionary is completed.
• Spring – George Orwell moves from London to Paris; his first articles as a professional writer are published later in the year.
• June – The literary magazine Contemporáneos is first published in Mexico by Jaime Torres Bodet, giving a name to the group Los Contemporáneos.
• June 27 – English writer Evelyn Waugh marries Evelyn Gardner (daughter of Lady Winifred Burghclere) in St Paul's Church, Portman Square, London, with only Harold Acton, Alec Waugh (the author's brother) and Pansy Pakenham present and they make their home in a small flat in Canonbury Square, Islington. In September the author's first completed novel, the satire Decline and Fall, is published by Chapman & Hall (of which his father Arthur is managing director); it reaches its 3rd printing by the end of the year. The marriage lasts until the following September.
• July – D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover is published in Florence; it will not be published in an unexpurgated edition in Britain until 1960.
• August 31 – The Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper), adapted by Bertolt Brecht, Elisabeth Hauptmann and composer Kurt Weill (with set designer Caspar Neher) from The Beggar's Opera, receives its première at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin with Harald Paulsen and Lotte Lenya in the principal rôles.

• September
  • S. S. Van Dine publishes "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories" in The American Magazine.
  • Leslie Charteris publishes Meet the Tiger in the U.K., the first adventure of Simon Templar, alias The Saint. Charteris will write dozens of novels and short stories featuring the character on a regular basis between 1928 and 1963, and others will continue the series until 1983.
• September 21 – The Gorseth Kernow is set up at Boscawen-Un in Cornwall by Henry Jenner ("Gwas Myghal") and others.
• October – Publication of 'Siburapha' (Kulap Saipradit)'s Luk Phu Chai ("A Real Man"), perhaps the first substantial original Thai novel.
• Autumn – W. H. Auden goes to Berlin, where he is soon joined by Christopher Isherwood.
• November–December – Erich Maria Remarque's antiwar novel All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues) is first published in the German newspaper Vossische Zeitung. Hans Herbert Grimm's Schlump is published (anonymously) by Kurt Wolff in Berlin this year also.

• November 1 – Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, President of Turkey, introduces the modern 29-letter Turkish alphabet to replace the Ottoman Turkish alphabet as the official writing system for the Turkish language.
• November 6 – Xu Zhimo writes his poem 再別康橋 (simplified Chinese 再别康桥, Zài Bié Kāngqiáo, "On Leaving Cambridge Once More").
• November 9–16 – Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness (published on July 27 by Jonathan Cape in London with an appreciation by Havelock Ellis) is tried and convicted on the grounds of obscenity (under the Hicklin test) due to its theme of lesbian love following a campaign by James Douglas in the Sunday Express newspaper. Other lesbian literature published in England this year remains unprosecuted: Elizabeth Bowen's novel The Hotel, Virginia Woolf's fictional Orlando: A Biography and Compton MacKenzie's satirical Extraordinary Women; Djuna Barnes' novel Ladies Almanack, published in Paris, also alludes to the controversy.
• December 9 – R. C. Sherriff's drama Journey's End, set on the Western Front (World War I), is premièred by the Incorporated Stage Society at the Apollo Theatre in London with Laurence Olivier in a principal rôle.
• December 19 – Italo Svevo (Aron Schmitz), returning from an Alpine health resort to Trieste, is involved in an automobile accident; he dies the next day leaving his novel Il Vegliardo ("The Old Man") unfinished in mid-word.
• Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay's novel Pather Panchali first appears as a serial in a Calcutta periodical.
• The clerihew, the comic pseudo-biographical verse form associated with Edmund Clerihew Bentley, is mentioned in print for the first time.
• It is estimated that one in four of all secular books printed and sold in England is written by Edgar Wallace.

Edgar Wallace with trademark trilby hat and cigarette holder at the height of his success in 1928

New prose fiction

• Mikheil Javakhishvili – Giwi Shaduri
• Mário de Andrade – Munacaima
• Giovanni Battista Angioletti – Il giorno del giudizio
• Leslie Barringer – Joris of the Rock
• Charles William Beebe – Beneath Tropic Seas
• Henry Bellamann – Crescendo
• André Breton – Nadja
• Edgar Rice Burroughs – Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle
• Morley Callaghan – Strange Fugitive
• Agatha Christie – The Mystery of the Blue Train
• Colette – Break of Day (La Naissance du jour)
• Frank Parker Day – Rockbound
• Franklin W. Dixon – Hunting for Hidden Gold
• W. E. B. Du Bois – Dark Princess
• Ephesian (C. E. Bechhofer Roberts) – This Side Idolatry
• Rudolph Fisher – The Walls of Jericho
• Esther Forbes – A Mirror for Witches
• Ford Madox Ford – Last Post
• E. M. Forster – The Eternal Moment and Other Stories
• August Gailit – Toomas Nipernaadi
• Reşat Nuri Güntekin – Yeşil Gece
• Radclyffe Hall – The Well of Loneliness
• Thea von Harbou – The Rocket to the Moon
• Georgette Heyer – The Masqueraders
• Aldous Huxley – Point Counter Point
• Ilf and Petrov – The Twelve Chairs (Двенадцать стульев, Dvenadtsat stulyev)
• Joseph Kessel – Belle de Jour
• Kwee Tek Hoay – Drama dari Krakatau (serialization)
• Selma Lagerlöf – Anna Svärd
• Nella Larsen – Quicksand
• D. H. Lawrence – Lady Chatterley's Lover
• Claude McKay – Home To Harlem
• W. Somerset Maugham – Ashenden: Or the British Agent
• A. A. Milne – The House at Pooh Corner
• Abdul Muis – Salah Asuhan
• Dhan Gopal Mukerji – Gay Neck, the Story of a Pigeon
• Vladimir Nabokov (as V. Sirin) – King, Queen, Knave (Король, дама, валет, Korol', dama, valet)
• Baroness Orczy – Skin o' My Tooth
• Anthony Powell – The Barnard Letters
• Premchand – Nirmala
• Jenaro Prieto – The Partner
• Erich Maria Remarque – All Quiet on the Western Front
• E. Arnot Robertson – Cullum
• Felix Salten – Bambi, A Life in the Woods (translation; the German original appeared in 1923)
• Siegfried Sassoon – Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man
• Dorothy L. Sayers
  • Lord Peter Views the Body
  • The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club
• Arthur Schnitzler – Therese
• Nan Shepherd – The Quarry Wood
• S. S. Van Dine
  • The Greene Murder Case
  • The Bishop Murder Case

• Edgar Wallace
  • Again Sanders
  • The Double
  • Elegant Edward (short stories)
  • The Flying Squad
  • The Gunner
  • The Orator (short stories)
  • The Thief in the Night (short stories)
  • The Twister
• Mika Waltari – Suuri illusioni
• Evelyn Waugh – Decline and Fall
• H. G. Wells – Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island
• Franz Werfel – Class Reunion (Der Abituriententag)
• Virginia Woolf – Orlando: A Biography
• S. Fowler Wright
  • Deluge
  • The Island of Captain Sparrow

New drama

• Jacinto Benavente – Pepa Doncel
• Bertolt Brecht – The Threepenny Opera
• Eduardo De Filippo – Filosoficamente
• Nikolai Erdman – The Suicide
• Marieluise Fleißer – Pioneers in Ingolstadt (Pioniere in Ingolstadt)
• Garrett Fort – Jarnegan
• Agha Hashar Kashmiri – Sita Banbas (published)
• Kwee Tek Hoay – Korbannja Yi Yong Toen (published serially)
• John Howard Lawson – The International
• Federico García Lorca – The Love of Don Perlimplín and Belisa in the Garden (Amor de Don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín, written)
• W. Somerset Maugham – The Sacred Flame
• Eugene O'Neill – Strange Interlude (first staging)
• Ouyang Yuqian – Pan Jinlian (潘金蓮)
• R. C. Sherriff – Journey's End
• Ben Travers – Plunder
• Sophie Treadwell – Machinal
• Louis Verneuil – Monsieur Lamberthier
• Roger Vitrac – Victor, or Power to the Children (Victor, ou les enfants au pouvoir)
• Edgar Wallace
  • The Lad
  • The Man Who Changed His Name
  • The Squeaker
• Carl Zuckmayer – Katharina Knie

Poetry

Main article: 1928 in poetry

• Stephen Vincent Benét – John Brown's Body
• Robert Frost – West-Running Brook
• Federico García Lorca – Romancero Gitano
• Siegfried Sassoon – The Heart's Journey

Non-fiction

• Max Aitken – Politicians and the War
• Edmund Blunden – Undertones of War (autobiography)
• Hall Caine – Recollections of Rossetti (second expanded version)
• Julius Evola – Imperialismo Pagano
• Sidney Bradshaw Fay – Origins of the World War
• Dion Fortune – Esoteric Orders and Their Work
• Harold Lloyd – An American Comedy (autobiography)
• Margaret Mead – Coming of Age in Samoa
• Paul Morand – Black Magic
• Tomas O'Crohan – Allagar na h-Inise ("Island Cross-Talk")
• Edgar Wallace – The Trial of Patrick Herbert Mahon
• H. G. Wells – The Open Conspiracy

Births

• January 1 – Iain Crichton Smith, Scottish writer (died 1998)
• January 7 – William Peter Blatty, American writer and filmmaker
• January 8 – Sander Vanocur, American journalist
• January 10 – Philip Levine, American poet (died 2015)
• January 16 – William Kennedy, American writer and journalist
• January 24 – Desmond Morris, English anthropologist and writer
• February 5 – Andrew Greeley, Irish-American priest and novelist (died 2013)
• February 9 – Roger Mudd, American journalist
• March 4 – Alan Sillitoe, English novelist (died 2010)
• March 12 – Edward Albee, American dramatist
• March 13 – Jane Grigson, English cookery writer (died 1990)
• March 30 – Tom Sharpe, English satirical author (died 2013)
• April 4 – Maya Angelou, American poet (died 2014)
• April 7 – Alan J. Pakula, American screenwriter (died 1998)
• April 17 – Cynthia Ozick, American author
• April 24 – Martin Seymour-Smith, English poet, biographer and critic (died 1998)
• May 4 – Thomas Kinsella, Irish poet
• June 10 – Maurice Sendak, American children's author and illustrator (died 2012)
• June 28 – Stan Barstow, English novelist (died 2011)
• July 16
  • Anita Brookner, English novelist
  • Robert Sheckley, American writer (died 2005)
• July 26 – Bernice Rubens, Welsh novelist (died 2004)
• September 6 – Robert M. Pirsig, American philosopher and author
• September 20 – Donald Hall, American poet and poet laureate
• October 3 – Alvin Toffler, American futurist writer
• October 10 – Sheila F. Walsh, English novelist (died 2009)
• November 2 – Paul Johnson, English historian and journalist
• November 9 – Anne Sexton, American poet (died 1974)
• November 12 – Marjorie W. Sharmat, American children's writer
• November 11 – Carlos Fuentes, Mexican writer (died 2012)
• December 16 – Philip K. Dick, American science fiction author (died 1982)

Deaths

• January 8 – Juan B. Justo, Argentine journalist (born 1865)
• January 11 – Thomas Hardy, English novelist and poet (born 1840)
• January 19 – Hans Hinrich Wendt, German theologian (born 1853)
• January 28 – Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, Spanish novelist, journalist and politician (born 1867)
• February 19 – Mildred Aldrich, American journalist (born 1853)
• February 29 – Adolphe Appia, Swiss scenery and lighting designer and writer (born 1862)
• March 4 – Paul Sabatier, French religious writer (born 1858)
• March 18 – Paul van Ostaijen, Flemish poet (born 1896)
• March 24
  • Didrik Hegermann Grønvold, Norwegian novelist (born 1855)
  • Charlotte Mew, English poet (born 1869; suicide)
• April 10 – Stanley J. Weyman, English novelist (born 1855)
• April 19 – Ladislav Klíma, Czech novelist and philosopher (born 1878)
• May 5 – Barry Pain, English writer (born 1864)
• May 16 – Edmund Gosse, English poet and critic (born 1849)
• May 22 – Francisco López Merino, Argentine poet (suicide, born 1904)
• July 8 – Crystal Eastman, American journalist (born 1881)
• August – Isaac Markens, American journalist (born 1846)
• August 16 – Antonín Sova, Czech poet (born 1864)
• August 24 – Oskar Jerschke, German dramatist (born 1861)
• December 16 – Elinor Wylie, American poet and novelist (stroke, born 1885)
• December 19 – Italo Svevo, Italian writer (born 1861)
• Unknown date – Henry Festing Jones, English biographer (born 1851)

Awards

• James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man
• James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: John Buchan, Montrose
• Newbery Medal for children's literature: Dhan Gopal Mukerji, Gayneck, the Story of a Pigeon
• Nobel Prize for Literature: Sigrid Undset
• Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Eugene O'Neill, Strange Interlude
• Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Edwin Arlington Robinson, Tristram
• Pulitzer Prize for the Novel: Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey