1930 in literature
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The year 1930 in literature involved some significant events and new books.
Events
- January 6 - The first literary character licensing agreement is signed by A. A. Milne, granting Stephen Slesinger U.S. and Canadian merchandising rights to the Winnie-the-Pooh works.
- July 14 - Luigi Pirandello's The Man With the Flower in His Mouth becomes the first-ever broadcast television drama.
- November 5 - Sinclair Lewis is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
- John Masefield becomes Poet Laureate of the UK.
- A Boston, Massachusetts court bans Theodore Dreiser's novel An American Tragedy (1925) as "obscene".
New books
- Vicki Baum - Grand Hotel
- Pearl S. Buck - East Wind: West Wind
- John Dickson Carr - It Walks By Night
- Leslie Charteris - Enter the Saint
- Agatha Christie
- The Murder at the Vicarage
- The Mysterious Mr. Quin
- Giant's Bread (as by Mary Westmacott)
- John Dos Passos - The 42nd Parallel
- William Faulkner - As I Lay Dying
- Rachel Field - Hitty, Her First Hundred Years
- Zona Gale - Bridal Pond
- Dashiell Hammett - The Maltese Falcon
- Hermann Hesse - Narcissus and Goldmund
- Georgette Heyer - Powder and Patch
- Sydney Horler - Checkmate
- Langston Hughes - Not Without Laughter
- Carolyn Keene - The Secret of the Old Clock
- Oliver La Farge - Laughing Boy
- D. H. Lawrence - The Virgin and the Gypsy
- W. Somerset Maugham - Cakes and Ale
- André Malraux - The Royal Way (La Voie Royale)
- André Maurois - Fattypuffs and Thinifers (Patapoufs et Filifers)
- George A. Moore
- Aphrodite in Aulis
- A Flood
- Vladimir Nabokov
- Irène Némirovsky - Le Bal
- Camil Petrescu - Ultima noapte de dragoste, întâia noapte de război (The Last Night of Love, the First Night of War)
- Watty Piper - The Little Engine That Could
- J. B. Priestley - Angel Pavement
- Ellery Queen - The French Powder Mystery
- Ayn Rand - Anthem
- Elizabeth Madox Roberts - The Great Meadow
- Arthur Ransome - Swallows and Amazons
- Dorothy L. Sayers
- Strong Poison
- The Documents in the Case (written with Robert Eustace)
- Upton Sinclair - Mental Radio
- Olaf Stapledon - Last and First Men
- Miguel de Unamuno - San Manuel Bueno, Mártir
- Hugh Walpole - Rogue Herries
- Evelyn Waugh - Vile Bodies
- Thornton Wilder - The Woman of Andros
- Philip Gordon Wylie - Gladiator
New drama
- Antoine Bibesco - Ladies All
- Bertolt Brecht - Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and The Decision
- Ferdinand Bruckner - Elisabeth of England
- Marc Connelly - The Green Pastures
- Noel Coward - Private Lives
- Geoffrey Kerr - London Calling
- Federico García Lorca - The Public and The Shoemaker's Prodigious Wife
Poetry
- W. H. Auden - Poems
- T. S. Eliot - Ash Wednesday
- William Empson - Seven Types of Ambiguity
Non-fiction
- Muhammad Iqbal - The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam
- Edouard de Pomiane - Cuisine en dix minutes
- W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman - 1066 and All That
- Owen Wister - Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship
Births
- January 23 - Derek Walcott, author
- February 17 - Ruth Rendell, writer
- March 8 - Douglas Hurd, politician and novelist
- July 15 - Jacques Derrida, literary critic (d. 2004)
- August 17 - Ted Hughes, poet (d. 1998)
- September 25 - Shel Silverstein, poet (d. 1999)
- October 10 - Harold Pinter, playwright (d. 2008)
- November 1 - A. R. Gurney, dramatist
- November 5 - Clifford Irving, literary forger
- November 16 - Chinua Achebe, Nigerian writer, academic, and literary critic
- November 18 - J. G. Ballard, author (d. 2009)
Deaths
- January 16 - Johannes Gillhoff, German writer and educator (b. 1861)
- February 27 - George Haven Putnam, American author, publisher
- March 2 - D. H. Lawrence, novelist and poet (b. 1885)
- March 11 - Edward Franklin Albee II, theatre impresario (b. 1857)
- March 12 - Alois Jirásek, novelist and dramatist
- April 21 - Robert Bridges, Poet Laureate (b. 1844)
- April 14 - Vladimir Mayakovsky, Russian poet (b. 1893)
- April 22 - Jeppe Aakjær, Danish poet and novelist (b. 1866)
- May 17 - Herbert Croly, political writer
- June 9 - Arthur St. John Adcock, novelist
- June 23 - Israel Gollancz, Shakespeare scholar (b. 1864)
- July 7 - Arthur Conan Doyle, British author and creator of Sherlock Holmes (b. 1859)
- August 29 - William Archibald Spooner, originator of the "spoonerism" (b. 1844)
- September - Karam Singh, Sikh historian (b. 1884)
- September 4 - Vladimir Arsenyev, explorer and travel writer (b. 1872)
- date unknown
- Sigurd Ibsen, politician and writer, son of Henrik Ibsen
- Maria Polydouri, Greek poet (b. 1902)
Awards
- James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: E. H. Young, Miss Mole
- James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: Francis Yeats-Brown, Lives of a Bengal Lancer
- Newbery Medal for children's literature: Rachel Field, Hitty, Her First Hundred Years
- Nobel Prize for Literature: Sinclair Lewis
- Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Marc Connelly, The Green Pastures
- Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Conrad Aiken: Selected Poems
- Pulitzer Prize for the Novel: Oliver La Farge - Laughing Boy