January 21–23 – A failed "Legionary Rebellion" in Bucharest, opposing loyalists of the Ion Antonescu government to the radically fascist Iron Guard, doubles as a pogrom against Romanian Jews. Avant-garde poet Ion Barbu joins a rebel squad storming into the Ministry of Education;[2] meanwhile, his colleague Ion Vinea protects a Jewish friend, the novelist Sergiu Dan.[3] The destruction of Jewish life and property is documented from inside the Jewish community by the photojournalist F. Brunea-Fox,[4] and by Marcel Janco. Janco's brother-in-law, essayist Jacques G. Costin, survives, but his brother is tortured and killed by the Guard; the murder prompts Janco to leave for British Palestine in February.[5]
Publication of Lord David Cecil's The English Poets by William Collins in London, first of the 'Britain in Pictures' series devised by Hilda Matheson (died 1940) to celebrate British identity.[7]
The Iași pogrom in Nazi-allied Romania is witnessed by the Italian war correspondent Curzio Malaparte, who recounts it in a chapter of his novel Kaputt (1944), for long the only work to deal with the events.[14]
August 18 – Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee, Jr., a 19-year-old poet of American paternity serving in Britain with the Royal Canadian Air Force, makes a high-altitude test flight in a Spitfire V from RAF Llandow in Wales, and then by September 3 completes the sonnet "High Flight" about the experience. On December 11 he dies in an air collision over England.
September – In Nazi-allied Romania, George Călinescu publishes his companion to Romanian literature (Istoria literaturii române de la origini până în prezent). It is condemned in the far-right press for including entries on Romanian Jewish writers, whose work has been explicitly banned.[17] It is eventually withdrawn from circulation, but its own racist undertones are criticized by intellectuals such as the Jewish (Felix Aderca and Mihail Sebastian) and the Romanian (Șerban Cioculescu, Mihai Ralea and Vladimir Streinu).[18]
c. October – The first known reference to Babi Yar in poetry is written soon after the Babi Yar massacres, the work of the young Jewish-Ukrainian poet from Kyiv and an eyewitness, Liudmila Titova; her poem "Babi Yar" will be discovered only in the 1990s.[19]
November – Brendan Behan is released from Borstal in England and deported back to Ireland.
December
During the Siege of Leningrad, Yakov Druskin, ill and starving, and Maria Malich, second wife of Russian avant-garde poet Danil Kharms (arrested this summer for treason and imprisoned in the psychiatric ward at Leningrad Prison No. 1, where he will die in 1942), trudge to Kharms' bombed-out apartment building to collect a trunk of manuscripts, so preserving his work and that of Alexander Vvedensky's for decades until it can be circulated.[21] Vvedensky, arrested in September in Kharkiv for "counterrevolutionary agitation", is evacuated, but dies of pleurisy on the way.
The poet Ezra Pound applies unsuccessfully to return to the U.S. from Italy. He begins appearing on Rome Radio with antisemitic broadcasts sympathetic to the Axis powers.[25]
Wikimedia Commons has media related to 1941 in literature.
^""The Bormann Decree" banning the use of the Fraktur typeface". About.com. Archived from the original on 2013-12-02. Retrieved 2013-10-23.
^Râpeanu, Valeriu (2003-04-12). "Când totul se prăbușea". Curierul Național. Bucharest.
^Coposu, Corneliu (2014). "Corneliu Coposu despre atitudinea lui Iuliu Maniu față de evrei". Caiete Silvane (in Romanian) (112). Archived from the original on 2015-07-05.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
^Sandqvist, Tom (2006). Dada East. The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London: MIT Press. pp. 379–380. ISBN 0-262-19507-0.
^David Burke (1 March 2009). Writers in Paris: Literary Lives in the City of Light. Catapult. p. 231. ISBN 978-1-58243-958-7.
^Carney, Michael (1995). Britain in Pictures: a history and bibliography. London: Werner Shaw. ISBN 9780907961093.
^Therese Giehse interview with W. Stuart McDowell, 1968, in "Acting Brecht: The Munich Years," The Brecht Sourcebook, Carol Martin and Henry Bial, editors (Routledge, 2000) p. 71.
^Bradford, Richard (2012). The Odd Couple: The curious friendship between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin. London: Robson Press. ISBN 9781849543750.
^Day, Barry (2005). Coward on Film: The Cinema of Noël Coward. Scarecrow Press. p. 83. ISBN 0-8108-5358-2.
^"Piccadilly Theatre: Blithe Spirit by Noel Coward". The Times. No. 48968. London. 1941-07-03. p. 2.
^Colesnic, Iurie (2006). "Alexandru Robot – poetul enigmelor (90 de ani de la naștere)" (PDF). Magazin Bibliologic (in Romanian) (1): 73. Archived from the original on 2012-02-27.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
^Stykalin, A. S.; Sereda, V. T. (2001). "1941. György Lukács la Lubianka". Magazin Istoric (12): 48–52.
^Gheorghiu, Mihai-Dinu (2011). "The Iași Pogrom in Curzio Malaparte's Kaputt: Between History and Fiction". In Glăjar, Valentina; Teodorescu, Jeanine (eds.). Local History, Transnational Memory in the Romanian Holocaust. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 47–56. ISBN 978-1-349-29451-0.
^Perry, Mike W. (1998-07-01). "Publication History of C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity". C. S. Lewis Web. Retrieved 2013-12-02.
^Jon Tuska (1988). In Manors and Alleys: A Casebook on the American Detective Film. Greenwood Press. p. 106. ISBN 978-0-313-25007-1.
^Rotman, Liviu (2008). Demnitate în vremuri de restriște. Bucharest: Editura Hasefer, Federation of Jewish Communities of Romania & Elie Wiesel National Institute for Studying the Holocaust in Romania. pp. 174–177. ISBN 978-973-630-189-6.
^Boia, Lucian (2012). Capcanele istoriei. Elita intelectuală românească între 1930 și 1950. Bucharest: Humanitas. pp. 238–245. ISBN 978-973-50-3533-4.
^"Первые стихи о Бабьем Яре. Людмила Титова". Babiy-Yar.Livejournal.com. 2012-10-04. Archived from the original on 2013-04-07. Retrieved 2013-02-23.
^Adams, J. Donald (1941-11-09). "Scott Fitzgerald's Last Novel". The New York Times. Retrieved 2014-01-08.
^Epstien, Thomas (2004). "Vvedensky in Love". The New Arcadia Review. 2. Boston College Honors Program. Archived from the original on 2010-12-08. Retrieved 2006-12-08.
^David H. Stam (November 2001). International Dictionary of Library Histories. Routledge. p. 700. ISBN 978-1-136-77785-1.
^Some Yugoslav Novelists. Jugoslovenska knjiga. 1954. p. 15.
^Ackroyd, Peter (1980). "Chronology". Ezra Pound and His World. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd. p. 118. ISBN 0500130698.
^George Watson; Ian R. Willison (1972). The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. CUP Archive. p. 557.
^T. A. Shippey (1996). Magill's Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature: Lest darkness fall. Salem Press. p. 559. ISBN 978-0-89356-909-9.
^Keating, H. R. F. (1982). Whodunit? – a guide to crime, suspense and spy fiction. London: Windward. ISBN 0-7112-0249-4.
^Hopkins, Chris (2007). English Fiction in the 1930s: Language, Genre, History. London: Continuum International Publishing Group. pp. 138–57. ISBN 0826489389.
^Cox, Michael, ed. (2004). The Concise Oxford Chronology of English Literature. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-860634-6.
^Daughter Vivyan Leonora Eyles (1909–1984) was still in Italy with her husband Mario Praz.
^Bergan, Ronald (June 27, 2012). "Nora Ephron obituary". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved March 22, 2017.
^Edward Vilga (1997). Acting Now: Conversations on Craft and Career. Rutgers University Press. p. 100. ISBN 978-0-8135-2403-0.
^De Vera, Ruel (6 May 2018). "National Artist for Literature Cirilo F. Bautista, 76, writes 30". Philippine Daily Inquirer. Retrieved 7 May 2018.
^Kerry Flattley; Chris Wallace-Crabbe (1993). From the Republic of Conscience: An International Anthology of Poetry. White Pine Press. p. 177. ISBN 978-1-877727-26-9.
^John Mole (1993). Depending on the Light. Peterloo Poets. ISBN 978-1-871471-38-0.
^Alba della Fazia Amoia; Professor Emeritus Alba Amoia; Bettina Liebowitz Knapp (2004). Multicultural Writers Since 1945: An A-to-Z Guide. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 410. ISBN 978-0-313-30688-4.
^David Karashima (1 September 2020). Who We're Reading When We're Reading Murakami. Soft Skull Press. p. 92. ISBN 978-1-59376-590-3.
^Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition (UK library card required): Arnim, Mary Annette [May] von. Retrieved 5 March 2014.
^"Virginia Woolf". The British Library. Archived from the original on 11 August 2023. Retrieved 28 March 2019.
^"Émile Nelligan | Canadian poet". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 17 April 2019.