1934 in literature

Events

• January 7 – The first Flash Gordon comic strip is created and illustrated by Alex Raymond and published in the United States.
• January 25 – James Joyce's novel Ulysses, after a December acquittal in United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, is first published in an authorized edition in the Anglophone world by Random House of New York City. It has 12,000 advance sales.
• January – B. Traven's novel The Death Ship first appears in English.
• February – Stefan Zweig flees Austria and settles in London.
• February 6 – The February 6 riots in France, partly provoked by a performance of Shakespeare's Coriolanus by the Comédie-Française, will become the focus of a cult in the works of far-right authors, notably Death on Credit by Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Gilles by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle. Also in 1934, Drieu announces his conversion to fascism, with the essay Socialisme fasciste.
• March 16 and October 5 – P. G. Wodehouse's Thank You, Jeeves and Right Ho, Jeeves, the first full-length novels to feature Jeeves, are published.
• April – F. Scott Fitzgerald's fourth and final completed novel, Tender Is the Night, appears in book form in New York, after serialization since January in the monthly Scribner's Magazine.
• April 3 – The English literary biographer Thomas Wright first publishes, in the Daily Express, some facts about Charles Dickens' relations with the actress Ellen Ternan.
• April 6 – Rudyard Kipling and W. B. Yeats are awarded the Gothenburg Prize for Poetry.
• May 1 – The first officially designated Thingplatz for the performance of Thingspiele is dedicated in the Brandberge in Halle.
• June
• *A medieval manuscript of Le Morte d'Arthur used by Caxton is identified in the Fellows' Library of Winchester College by the bibliophile Walter Fraser Oakeshott.
• *The English poet Laurie Lee walks out one midsummer morning from his Gloucestershire home, bound for Spain.
• *Two notable gentleman detectives of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, set in England, begin their series. The first to feature Inspector Roderick Alleyn of Scotland Yard is A Man Lay Dead by Ngaio Marsh, at this time resident in her native New Zealand, published in London. The first Sir Henry Merrivale locked room mystery, The Plague Court Murders, appears from John Dickson Carr, at this time resident in the UK and writing as "Carter Dickson", in New York around early June. It is followed in December by The White Priory Murders.
• July 17 – The circular Manchester Central Library, England, opens.
• August – Boris Pasternak and Korney Chukovsky are among those at the first Congress of the Soviet Union of Writers.
• September – Henry Miller's novel Tropic of Cancer is published in Paris by the Obelisk Press. The United States Customs Service prohibits imports of it.
• October 22 – A new Cambridge University Library, designed by Giles Gilbert Scott, opens in England.
• October 24 – The first of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe detective novels, Fer-de-Lance, is published in New York, and abridged in the November The American Magazine as "Point of Death."
• November 20 – Lillian Hellman's first successful play, The Children's Hour, dealing with a theme of accusations of lesbianism, opens at the Maxine Elliott Theatre on Broadway in New York, where it will run for two years.
• December 25 – The Romanian novelist Panait Istrati, a former communist, begins his collaboration with the quasi-fascist Cruciada Românismului with a polemic against antisemitism. The weekly newspaper, edited by Mihai Stelescu and Alexandru Talex, later hosts pieces by Constantin Virgil Gheorghiu.

• The first three volumes of Mikhail Sholokhov's novel And Quiet Flows the Don first appear in English under this title.

  New books

Fiction

• M. Ageyev – Cocain Romance
• Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie – After Worlds Collide
• Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay – Pother Kanta
• Samuel Beckett – More Pricks Than Kicks
• James Branch Cabell – Smirt
• James M. Cain – The Postman Always Rings Twice
• Morley Callaghan – Such Is My Beloved
• Victor Canning – Mr. Finchley Discovers His England
• John Dickson Carr
• *The Blind Barber
• *The Eight of Swords
• *The Bowstring Murders
• *The Plague Court Murders
• *The White Priory Murders
• *Devil Kinsmere
• Gabriel Chevallier – Clochemerle
• Agatha Christie
• *Murder on the Orient Express
• *Why Didn't They Ask Evans?
• *The Listerdale Mystery
• *Parker Pyne Investigates
• *Unfinished Portrait
• Colette – Duo
• Freeman Wills Crofts – The 12.30 from Croydon
• Henry de Montherlant – Les Célibataires
• Isak Dinesen – Seven Gothic Tales
• Pierre Drieu La Rochelle – The Comedy of Charleroi
• Max Ernst – Une semaine de bonté
• F. Scott Fitzgerald – Tender Is the Night
• Carlo Emilio Gadda – Il castello di Udine
• Jeanne Galzy – Jeunes Filles en serre chaude
• Jean Giono – The Song of the World
• Robert Graves – I, Claudius
• Graham Greene – It's a Battlefield
• Hergé – Cigars of the Pharaoh
• Harold Heslop
• *The Crime of Peter Ropner
• *Goaf
• Robert Hichens – The Power To Kill
• James Hilton – Goodbye, Mr. Chips
• Richard Hull – The Murder of My Aunt
• Zora Neale Hurston – Jonah's Gourd Vine: A Novel
• F. Tennyson Jesse – A Pin to See the Peepshow
• D. Gwenallt Jones – Plasau'r Brenin
• John Knittel – Via Mala
• Halldór Laxness – Independent People — Part I, Icelandic Pioneers
• Alexander Lernet-Holenia – The Standard
• Marie Belloc Lowndes
• *Another Man's Wife
• *The Chianti Flask
• Compton Mackenzie – The Darkening Green
• Henry Miller – Tropic of Cancer
• Leopold Myers – Rajah Amar
• Vladimir Nabokov – Despair
• Carolina Nabuco – A Sucessora
• John O'Hara – Appointment in Samarra
• E. Phillips Oppenheim – The Strange Boarders of Palace Crescent
• George Orwell – Burmese Days
• John Cowper Powys
• *Autobiography
• *Weymouth Sands
• Ellery Queen – The Chinese Orange Mystery
• Henry Roth – Call It Sleep
• Rafael Sabatini – Venetian Masque
• Dorothy L. Sayers – The Nine Tailors
• Bruno Schulz – The Street of Crocodiles
• Mihail Sebastian – De două mii de ani
• J. Slauerhoff – Het leven op aarde
• Howard Spring – Shabby Tiger
• Irving Stone – Lust for Life
• Ruth Suckow – The Folks
• Rex Stout – Fer-de-Lance
• Phoebe Atwood Taylor
• *The Mystery of the Cape Cod Tavern
• *Sandbar Sinister
• Thomas F. Tweed – Blind Mouths
• S. S. Van Dine
• *The Dragon Murder Case
• *The Casino Murder Case
• Simon Vestdijk – Terug tot Ina Damman
• Evelyn Waugh – A Handful of Dust
• Nathanael West – A Cool Million
• Dennis Wheatley – The Devil Rides Out
• Dorothy Whipple – They Knew Mr. Knight
• P. G. Wodehouse
• *Thank You, Jeeves
• *Right Ho, Jeeves
• S. Fowler Wright
• *David
• *Prelude in Prague: The War of 1938
• *Who Else But She?
• V. M. Yeates – Winged Victory
• Marguerite Yourcenar – A Coin in Nine Hands ''

  Children and young people

• Edgar Rice Burroughs – Tarzan and the Lion Man
• Elena Fortún – Celia en el mundo
• Capt. W. E. Johns – Biggles of the Camel Squadron
• Lorna Lewis – The Little French Poodle
• Constantin S. Nicolăescu-Plopșor – Paramiseà romanè
• Arthur Ransome – Coot Club
• Hilda van Stockum – A Day on Skates
• William Woodthorpe Tarn – The Treasure of the Isle of Mist
• P. L. Travers – Mary Poppins
• Geoffrey Trease – Bows Against the Barons

  Drama