The year 1945 in literature involved some significant events and new books.
Events
- January 27 - Primo Levi is among those liberated from the Auschwitz concentration camp complex.
- February - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is sentenced to eight years in a labour camp for criticism of Stalin.
- February 13â€"15 - The bombing of Dresden in World War II is witnessed by German Jewish diarist Victor Klemperer, by novelist Kurt Vonnegut as an American prisoner of war detained in Slaughterhouse Five, and by Miles Tripp as a British bomb aimer. It will feature in Józef Mackiewicz's novel Sprawa pulkownika Miasojedowa ("Colonel Miasoyedov's Case") (1962), Bohumil Hrabal's OstÅ™e sledované vlaky ("Closely Observed Trains") (1965) and Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (1969) .
- March 4 - Poet Pablo Neruda is elected a Communist party senator in Chile. He officially joins the Communist Party of Chile four months later.
- March 8 - Federico GarcÃa Lorca's play The House of Bernarda Alba, completed just before his assassination in 1936, is first performed, in Buenos Aires.
- March 31 - Tennessee Williams' semi-autobiographical "memory play" The Glass Menagerie (1944, adapted from a short story) has its Broadway première at the Playhouse Theatre (New York City) starring Laurette Taylor and winning the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award.
- May - Estonian poet Heiti Talvik is deported to Siberia and never heard from again.
- May 2 - Expatriate American poet Ezra Pound is arrested by the Italian resistance movement and taken to their headquarters in Chiavari, where he is soon released as possessing no interest. On May 5, he turns himself in to the United States Army. He is incarcerated in a military detention camp outside Pisa, spending 25 days in an open cage before being given a tent. Here he appears to have suffered a nervous breakdown. While in the camp he drafts The Pisan Cantos.
- May 8 - End of World War II in Europe. The occupying powers in Allied-occupied Germany and Austria will impose restrictions on publishing as part of denazification.
- June - Australia's most celebrated literary hoax takes place when the modernist magazine Angry Penguins is published with poems by the fictitious Ern Malley. Poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart created the poems from lines of other published work and then sent them as the purported work of a recently deceased poet. The hoax is played on Max Harris, at this time a 22-year-old avant garde poet and critic who had started Angry Penguins. Harris and his circle of literary friends agree that a hitherto completely unknown modernist poet of great merit has come to light in suburban Australia. The Autumn 1944 edition of the magazine with the poems comes out in mid-1945 due to wartime printing delays. An Australian newspaper uncovers the hoax within weeks. McAuley and Stewart love early Modernist poets but despise later modernism and especially the well-funded Angry Penguins and are jealous of Harris's precocious success.
- August 17 - The allegorical dystopian novella Animal Farm by George Orwell, a satire on Stalinism, is first published by Fredric Warburg in London.
- September 11 - The Citizens Theatre opens in Glasgow under this name.
- November 1 - The U.S. magazine Ebony is published for the first time.
- November 26 - Release in the United Kingdom of the film Brief Encounter adapted from Noël Coward's short play Still Life.
- December 21 - André Malraux is appointed minister of information by French President Charles de Gaulle.
- December - Nag Hammadi library, a collection of Gnostic texts, is discovered in Upper Egypt.
- The novelist Colette is the first woman to be admitted to the Académie Goncourt.
- Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs write the mystery novel And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks; it will not be published in full until 2008.
- Vladimir Nabokov becomes a naturalized citizen of the United States.
- Theatre Workshop is formed in Britain by Joan Littlewood, Ewan MacColl and other former members of Theatre Union as a touring company.
New books
- Ivo Andric â€" The Bridge on the Drina (Na Drini Ćuprija)
- Rev. W. V. Awdry â€" The Three Railway Engines
- Banine â€" Caucasian days (Jours caucasiens)
- Frans G. Bengtsson â€" The Long Ships (Röde Orm), part 2
- Adolfo Bioy Casares â€" A Plan for Escape (Plan de evasión)
- Robert Bloch â€" The Opener of the Way (anthology)
- Hermann Broch â€" The Death of Virgil (Der Tod des Vergil)
- Gwendolyn Brooks â€" A Street in Bronzeville
- Taylor Caldwell â€" The Wide House
- John Dickson Carr â€" The Curse of the Bronze Lamp (as by Carter Dickson)
- Vera Caspary â€" Bedelia
- Agatha Christie â€" Sparkling Cyanide
- Colette â€" Gigi
- Thomas B. Costain â€" The Black Rose
- Gertrude Crampton â€" Tootle
- August Derleth
- "In Re: Sherlock Holmes" â€" The Adventures of Solar Pons
- Something Near
- Varian Fry â€" Surrender on Demand
- Julien Gracq â€" A Dark Stranger
- Henry Green â€" Loving
- Tove Jansson â€" SmÃ¥trollen och den stora översvämningen (The Moomins and the Great Flood)
- Ruth Krauss â€" The Carrot Seed
- Margery Lawrence â€" Number Seven, Queer Street
- Robert Lawson â€" Rabbit Hill
- J. Sheridan Le Fanu (d. 1873) â€" Green Tea and Other Ghost Stories
- C. S. Lewis â€" That Hideous Strength
- Astrid Lindgren â€" Pippi LÃ¥ngstrump (and English translation as Pippi Longstocking)
- H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth â€" The Lurker at the Threshold
- Compton Mackenzie â€" The North Wind of Love, Book 2 (last of The Four Winds of Love hexalogy)
- Hugh MacLennan â€" Two Solitudes
- Nancy Mitford â€" The Pursuit of Love
- R. K. Narayan â€" The English Teacher
- George Orwell â€" Animal Farm
- Gabrielle Roy â€" Bonheur d'occasion (The Tin Flute)
- Jean-Paul Sartre â€" L'âge de raison (The Age of Reason)
- Elizabeth Smart â€" By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
- John Steinbeck â€" Cannery Row
- James Thurber â€" The Thurber Carnival (anthology)
- Elio Vittorini â€" Uomini e no (Men and not Men)
- Mika Waltari â€" The Egyptian (Sinuhe egyptiläinen)
- Evangeline Walton â€" Witch House
- Evelyn Waugh â€" Brideshead Revisited
- E. B. White â€" Stuart Little
- Cornell Woolrich â€" Night Has a Thousand Eyes
- Richard Wright â€" Black Boy
New drama
- Mary Chase - Harvey
- Eduardo De Filippo - Napoli milionaria ("The Millions of Naples")
- Jean Giraudoux - The Madwoman of Chaillot (La Folle de Chaillot, posthumously produced)
- Curt Goetz - The House in Montevideo (Das Haus in Montevideo)
- Arthur Laurents - Home of the Brave
- J. B. Priestley - An Inspector Calls
Poetry
- Idris Davies - Tonypandy and other poems
Non-fiction
- R. G. Collingwood â€" The Idea of Nature
- Carlo Emilio Gadda â€" Eros e Priapo
- Aldous Huxley â€" The Perennial Philosophy
- Arthur Koestler â€" The Yogi and the Commissar and other essays
- Carlo Levi â€" Christ Stopped at Eboli (Cristo si è fermato a Eboli)
- Betty MacDonald â€" The Egg and I
- Karl Popper â€" The Open Society and Its Enemies
- Bertrand Russell â€" A History of Western Philosophy And Its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day
- Ernesto Sabato â€" One and the Universe (Uno y el Universo)
- Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. â€" The Age of Jackson
Births
- January 3 â€" David Starkey, English historian
- January 30 â€" Michael Dorris, American writer (died 1997)
- February 12 â€" David Small, American author and illustrator
- February 23 â€" Robert Gray, Australian poet and critic
- February 25 â€" Shiva Naipaul, Trinidad-born novelist (died 1985)
- March 19 â€" Jim Turner, American literary editor (died 1999)
- April 2 â€" Anne Waldman, American poet
- April 27 â€" August Wilson, American playwright (died 2005)
- April 30 â€" Annie Dillard, American poet and prose writer
- July 5 â€" Michael Blake, American novelist and screenwriter (died 2015)
- July 9 â€" Dean Koontz, American novelist
- July 12 â€" Remy Sylado (Yapi Panda Abdiel Tambayong), Indonesian writer
- July 21 â€" Wendy Cope, English poet
- July 30 â€" Patrick Modiano, French novelist, Nobel laureate
- October 15 â€" John Murrell, American-born dramatist
- December 17 â€" Jacqueline Wilson, English children's writer
- Unknown dates
- Justin Cartwright, South African-born novelist
- Esther Croft, French Canadian novelist and short-story writer
- Raymond E. Feist, American fantasy writer
Deaths
- January 13 â€" Margaret Deland, American novelist (born 1857)
- January 15 â€" Ursula Bethell, English-born New Zealand poet (born 1874)
- January 22 â€" Else Lasker-Schüler, German-born Jewish poet (born 1869)
- January 27 â€" Antal Szerb, Hungarian writer (in concentration camp, born 1901)
- February 6 â€" Robert Brasillach, French writer (executed, born 1909)
- c. March 12 â€" Anne Frank, German-born Dutch child diarist (probable typhus in concentration camp, born 1929)
- March 20 â€" Lord Alfred Douglas, English poet (born 1870)
- March 31 â€" Maurice Donnay, French dramatist (born 1859)
- April 9 â€" Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German theologian (hanged in concentration camp, born 1906)
- May 15 â€" Charles Williams, English author (born 1886)
- June 8 â€" Robert Desnos, French poet (in concentration camp, born 1900)
- July 13 â€" Alla Nazimova, Crimean-born American scriptwriter and actress (born 1879)
- July 25 â€" Charles Gilman Norris, American novelist (born 1881)
- August 18 â€" E. R. Eddison, English fantasy writer (born 1882)
- August 20 â€" Alexander Roda Roda, Austro-Croatian-born novelist (born 1872)
- August 26 â€" Franz Werfel, Bohemian-born writer (born 1890)
- September 9 â€" Zinaida Gippius, émigré Russian writer (born 1869)
- September 22 â€" Thomas Burke, English novelist and story writer (born 1886)
- October 8 â€" Felix Salten, Austrian-born children's writer (born 1869)
- November 21 â€" Robert Benchley, American humorist (born 1889)
- December 4 â€" Arthur Morrison, English writer (born 1863)
- December 28 â€" Theodore Dreiser, American author (born 1871)
Awards
- James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: L. A. G. Strong, Travellers
- James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: D. S. MacColl, Philip Wilson Steer
- Newbery Medal for children's literature: Robert Lawson, Rabbit Hill
- Nobel Prize for literature: Gabriela Mistral
- Premio Nadal: José Félix Tapia, La luna ha entrado en casa
- Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Mary Chase, Harvey
- Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Karl Shapiro, V-Letter and Other Poems
- Pulitzer Prize for the Novel: John Hersey, A Bell for Adano