1928 in literature

Events

• January
• *The Soviet magazine Oktyabr begins publishing Mikhail Sholokhov's novel And Quiet Flows the Don in instalments.
• *Ford Madox Ford publishes Last Post in the U.K., as the last in his World War I tetralogy Parade's End, which has been appearing since 1924.
• January 16 – The English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy's ashes are interred in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey, London. Pallbearers include Stanley Baldwin, J. M. Barrie, John Galsworthy, Edmund Gosse, A. E. Housman, Rudyard Kipling, Ramsay MacDonald and George Bernard Shaw. Meanwhile Hardy's heart is interred where he wished to be buried, in the grave of his first wife, Emma, in the churchyard of his parish of birth, Stinsford in Dorset. Later in the year, his widow Florence publishes the first part of a biography, The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840–1891, in fact largely dictated by Hardy.
• February – Weird Tales magazine publishes H. P. Lovecraft's story "The Call of Cthulhu" in the United States.
• March 31 – Stockholm Public Library, designed by Gunnar Asplund, opens.
• 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 appear 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 – The 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 and Pansy Pakenham present. They move into a flat in Canonbury Square, Islington. In September the author's first completed novel, Decline and Fall, is published by Chapman & Hall, of which his father, Arthur Waugh, is managing director. It is illustrated by the author. It reaches a third impression 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 It will not be published unexpurgated in Britain until 1960.
• August 27 – Taibhdhearc na Gaillimhe in Galway is founded as the national Irish-language theater, opening with Micheál Mac Liammóir's version of Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne.
• August 31 – The Threepenny Opera , adapted by Bertolt Brecht, Elisabeth Hauptmann and composer Kurt Weill from The Beggar's Opera, is launched 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. Charteris will write dozens of novels and stories with the character in 1928–1963; successor writers will continue until 1983.
• September 21 – The Gorseth Kernow is set up at Boscawen-Un in Cornwall by Henry Jenner and others.
• October
• *W. H. Auden goes to Berlin and is soon joined by Christopher Isherwood.
• *Luk Phu Chai, perhaps the first major original Thai novel, is published by Siburapha.
• October 14 – The Gate Theatre in Dublin is founded by English actors and lovers Micheál Mac Liammóir and Hilton Edwards, initially using the Abbey Theatre's Peacock studio to stage works by European and American dramatists.
• November–December – Erich Maria Remarque's antiwar novel All Quiet on the Western Front appears in the German newspaper Vossische Zeitung. :de:Hans Herbert Grimm|Hans Herbert Grimm's :de:Schlump |Schlump is also published by :de:Kurt Wolff |Kurt Wolff in Berlin this year.
• November 1 – Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, President of Turkey, introduces the Roman-based 29-letter Turkish alphabet to replace the Ottoman script as official writing system for the Turkish language.
• November 6 – Xu Zhimo writes his poem 再別康橋.
• 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 at Bow Street Magistrates' Court on the grounds of obscenity under the Hicklin test, for its theme of lesbian love, after a campaign against it by James Douglas in the Sunday Express. The presiding magistrate, Sir Chartres Biron, holds that the book contains "not one word which suggested that anyone with the horrible tendencies described was in the least degree blameworthy. All the characters in the book were presented as attractive people and put forward with admiration." Other lesbian literature published in England this year evades prosecution: Elizabeth Bowen's novel The Hotel, Virginia Woolf's fictional , 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, is premièred by the Incorporated Stage Society at the Apollo Theatre in London, with Laurence Olivier in a principal rôle.
• December 19 – Italo Svevo, returning from an Alpine resort to Trieste, suffers a car accident. He dies next day leaving his novel Il Vegliardo unfinished in mid-word.
• unknown dates
• *Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay's novel Pather Panchali first appears as a serial in a Calcutta periodical.
• *The clerihew, a comic pseudo-biographical verse form associated with Edmund Clerihew Bentley, is first mentioned in print.
• *It is claimed that one in four of all secular books printed and sold in England are written by Edgar Wallace.

New books

Fiction

• 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
• Mary Butts – Armed with Madness
• Morley Callaghan – Strange Fugitive
• Ferreira de Castro – Emigrantes
• Agatha Christie – The Mystery of the Blue Train
• Colette – Break of Day
• Frank Parker Day – Rockbound
• Franklin W. Dixon – Hunting for Hidden Gold
• W. E. B. Du Bois – Dark Princess
• Ephesian – 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
• Mikheil Javakhishvili – Givi Shaduri
• Joseph Kessel – Belle de Jour
• Kwee Tek Hoay – Drama dari Krakatau
• Selma Lagerlöf – Anna Svärd
• Nella Larsen – Quicksand
• D. H. Lawrence – Lady Chatterley's Lover
• Claude McKay – Home To Harlem
• Compton Mackenzie – Extremes Meet
• W. Somerset Maugham – '
• Abdul Muis – Salah Asuhan
• Dhan Gopal Mukerji – Gay Neck, the Story of a Pigeon
• Vladimir Nabokov – King, Queen, Knave
• 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
• 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
• Păstorel Teodoreanu – Hronicul Măscăriciului Vălătuc
• S. S. Van Dine
• *The Greene Murder Case
• *The Bishop Murder Case
• Edgar Wallace
• *Again Sanders
• * Again the Three Just Men
• *The Double
• *Elegant Edward
• *The Flying Squad
• *The Gunner
• *The Orator
• *The Thief in the Night
• *The Twister
• Mika Waltari – Suuri illusioni
• Evelyn Waugh – Decline and Fall
• H. G. Wells – Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island
• Franz Werfel – Class Reunion
• Virginia Woolf – '
• S. Fowler Wright
• *Deluge
• *The Island of Captain Sparrow
• Francis Brett Young – My Brother Jonathan

  Children and young people

• Joyce Lankester Brisley – Milly-Molly-Mandy Stories
• Edgar Rice Burroughs – Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle
• Wanda Gág – Millions of Cats
• A. A. Milne – The House at Pooh Corner
• Felix Salten – Bambi, A Life in the Woods
• Ruth Plumly Thompson – The Giant Horse of Oz

  Drama