istoryworld
American Literature timeline
US novelist Erskine Caldwell publishes Tobacco Road, about white sharecroppers coping with poverty and desperation in Georgia
Young Lonigan: a Boyhood in Chicago Streets is the first novel in James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan trilogy
US author Damon Runyon publishes his first collection of stories about low-life New York, under the title Guys and Dolls
In My Life and Hard Times James Thurber's publishes an affectionate account of his family, including the night the bed fell on his father
Erskine Caldwell publishes a novel, God's Little Acre, about a farmer obsessed with finding gold on his farm
US author Scott FitzGerald publishes his novel Tender Is the Night
In Lillian Hellman's play The Children's Hour two teachers are maliciously accused of lesbianism by one of their pupils
Tortilla Flat brings success for the US novelist John Steinbeck
US author Margaret Mitchell publishes her one book, which becomes probably the best-selling novel of all time – Gone with the Wind
William Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom! chronicles the violently destructive rise and fall of a poor Southern white, Thomas Sutpen
French-born US author Anaïs Nin publishes her first novel, The House of Incest
John Steinbeck publishes Of Mice and Men, a novel about two itinerant farm labourers in California
Thornton Wilder's play Our Town opens on Broadway
Delmore Schwartz publishes his first book of poems, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities
James Thurber publishes his short story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath follows the Joad family, sharecroppers who are forced to move west to escape the horrors of the Dust Bowl
US crime-writer Raymond Chandler publishes his first novel, The Big Sleep, introducing the hard-boiled detective Philip Marlowe
German novelist Thomas Mann takes US citizenship and in 1941 moves to California
US author Richard Wright publishes Native Son, his semi-autobiographical novel about racial equality
Ernest Hemingway publishes the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, set in the Spanish Civil War
US author Carson McCullers publishes her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
In To the Finland Station Edmund Wilson discusses the development of socialism and revolution, culminating in Lenin and Trotsky
Scott FitzGerald's final and incomplete novel, The Last Tycoon, is published posthumously
Agee and Evans give a warm personal view of America in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
US author Eudora Welty publishes her first collection of stories, A Curtain of Green
