The year 1939 in literature involved some significant events and new books.

Events

• December 25 - A Christmas Carol is read before a radio audience for the first time.
• Frank Herbert lies about his age to get his first job as a local newspaper reporter.
• Jean-Paul Sartre is drafted into the French Army.
• Robert A. Heinlein's first published short story appears in Astounding Magazine.
• Captain Marvel debuts in Whiz Comics #2 (cover date February 1940).

New prose fiction

• Eric Ambler - The Mask of Dimitrios
• Sholem Asch - The Nazarene
• William Attaway - Let Me Breathe Thunder
• Arna Wendell Bontemps - Drums at Dusk
• Pearl S. Buck - The Patriot
• Edgar Rice Burroughs - Tarzan the Magnificent
• John Dickson Carr
  • The Black Spectacles
  • The Problem of the Wire Cage
  • The Reader is Warned (as by Carter Dickson)
  • Drop to His Death (in collaboration with John Rhode)
• Aim C saire - Cahier d'un Retour au Pays Natal
• Raymond Chandler - The Big Sleep
• Agatha Christie
  • And Then There Were None
  • Murder is Easy
  • The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories
• Jeffrey Dell - Nobody Ordered Wolves
• John Fante - Ask the Dust
• William Faulkner - If I Forget Thee Jerusalem (The Wild Palms/Old Man)
• Vardis Fisher - Children of God
• Zona Gale - Magna
• Henry Green - Party Going
• Ernest Hemingway - The Snows of Kilimanjaro
• Zora Neale Hurston - Moses, Man Of The Mountain
• Aldous Huxley - After Many a Summer
• Christopher Isherwood - Goodbye to Berlin
• James Joyce - Finnegans Wake
• Arthur Koestler - The Gladiators
• Richard Llewellyn - How Green Was My Valley
• H. P. Lovecraft - The Outsider and Others
• Lucy Maud Montgomery - Anne of Ingleside
• Flann O'Brien - At Swim-Two-Birds.
• John O'Hara - Files on Parade
• George Orwell - Coming Up for Air
• Elliot Paul - The Mysterious Mickey Finn
• Ellery Queen - The Dragon's Teeth
• Katherine Anne Porter - Pale Horse, Pale Rider
• Arthur Ransome - We Didn't Mean To Go To Sea
• Clayton Rawson - The Footprints on the Ceiling
• Seymour Reit- The Friendly Ghost
• Dorothy L. Sayers - In the Teeth of the Evidence
• John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath
• Rex Stout - Some Buried Caesar
• Phoebe Atwood Taylor
  • Spring Harrowing
  • Cold Steal (as by Alice Tilton)
• Dalton Trumbo - Johnny Got His Gun
• S. S. Van Dine - The Winter Murder Case
• Elio Vittorini - Conversations in Sicily (Conversazione in Sicilia)
• Nathanael West - The Day of the Locust
• Ernest Vincent Wright - Gadsby
• Pierre Schaeffer - Chlothar Nicole (Clotaire Nicole)
• Marguerite Yourcenar - Coup de Gr ce

New drama

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• Philip Barry - The Philadelphia Story
• Bertolt Brecht - Mother Courage and Her Children (written)
• T. S. Eliot - The Family Reunion
• Lillian Hellman - The Little Foxes
• George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart -The Man Who Came to Dinner
• Joseph Kesselring - Arsenic and Old Lace
• Jean Giraudoux - Ondine
• Clare Boothe Luce - Margin of Error</onlyinclude>

Poetry

• T. S. Eliot - Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats
• Javier del Granado - Rosas P lidas (Pale Roses)

Non-fiction

• Lord David Cecil - The Young Melbourne and the Story of his Marriage with Caroline Lamb
• Savitri Devi - A Warning to the Hindus
• Erwin Panofsky - Studies in Iconology
• Ed Ricketts - Between Pacific Tides
• Antoine de Saint-Exup ry - Wind, Sand and Stars (Terre des hommes)
• Ronald Syme - The Roman Revolution
• Bill W. & Dr. Bob - The Big Book

Births

• January 29 - Germaine Greer, feminist author
• April 12 - Alan Ayckbourn, dramatist
• June 5 - Margaret Drabble, novelist
• July 2 - Ferdinand Mount, journalist and novelist
• August 1 - Robert James Waller, American novelist
• October 6 - Melvyn Bragg, novelist, critic and television presenter
• October 9 - John Pilger, journalist
• October 10 - Clive James, writer, humorist and television personality
• November 17 - Auberon Waugh, journalist and son of Evelyn Waugh
• November 18 - Margaret Atwood, novelist and poet
• November 25 - Shelagh Delaney, dramatist (died 2011)
• December 18 - Michael Moorcock, science fiction author
• date unknown - Iris Gower, romantic novelist

Deaths

• January 28 - William Butler Yeats, poet (born 1865)
• February 18 - Okamoto Kanoko, tanka poet
• February 22 - Antonio Machado, poet
• March 7 - Ludwig Fulda
• March 23 - Richard Halliburton, travel writer
• April 11 - S. S. Van Dine, crime fiction writer
• May 23 - Margarete B hme, German novelist
• May 27 - Joseph Roth, novelist
• June 26 - Ford Madox Ford, novelist (born 1873)
• July 8 - Havelock Ellis, sexual psychologist and controversial writer (born 1859)
• September - Ethel M. Dell, romantic novelist
• September 6 - Arthur Rackham, book illustrator
• October 23 - Zane Grey, popular author of westerns (born 1872)
• December 2 - Llewelyn Powys, biographer and autobiographer
• Unknown Date - Solomon Cleaver, storyteller and novelist

Awards

• Carnegie Medal for children's literature: Eleanor Doorly, The Radium Woman
• James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: Aldous Huxley After Many a Summer Dies the Swan
• James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: David C. Douglas, English Scholars
• Newbery Medal for children's literature: Elizabeth Enright, Thimble Summer
• Nobel Prize for literature: Frans Eemil Sillanp
• Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Robert E. Sherwood, Abe Lincoln in Illinois
• Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: John Gould Fletcher: Selected Poems
• Pulitzer Prize for the Novel: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings - The Yearling

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