1934 in literature

This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1934.

Events
January 7 – The first Flash Gordon comic strip is published in the United States. January 25 – Following its acquittal the previous month in United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, James Joyce's novel Ulysses is first published in an authorized edition in the Anglophone world by Random House of New York. It has 12,000 advance sales.[1] January – B. Traven's novel The Death Ship (1926) is first published in English. February – Stefan Zweig flees Austria and settles in London. March 16 & October 5 – P. G. Wodehouse's Thank You, Jeeves and Right Ho, Jeeves, the first Jeeves stories written as full-length novels, are published. April – F. Scott Fitzgerald's fourth and final completed novel, Tender Is the Night, is published in book form in New York on conclusion of its serialization in the monthly Scribner's Magazine (since January). April 3 – English literary biographer Thomas Wright (of Olney) first publishes some facts concerning Charles Dickens' relationship with the actress Ellen Ternan (writing in the Daily Express).[2] 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 (Nazi Germany).[3] June A medieval manuscript of Le Morte d'Arthur used by Caxton is identified in the Fellows' Library of Winchester College (England) by schoolmaster and bibliophile Walter Fraser Oakeshott.[4] English poet Laurie Lee walks out one midsummer morning from his Gloucestershire home bound for Spain.

July 17 – Circular Manchester Central Library, England, opened. August – Boris Pasternak and Korney Chukovsky are among those present 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 its import into the U.S.[5] October 24 – The first of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe detective novels, Fer-de-Lance, is published in New York (and also abridged in The American Magazine for November under the title "Point of Death.") November 20 – Lillian Hellman's first successful play, The Children's Hour, with a theme of accusations of lesbianism, is premièred at the Maxine Elliott Theatre on Broadway in New York where it will run for 2 years. Two notable gentleman detective series characters of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction set in England are introduced: The first book featuring Inspector Roderick Alleyn of Scotland Yard, A Man Lay Dead, is published by Ngaio Marsh (at this time resident in her native New Zealand) in London. The first Sir Henry Merrivale locked room mystery, The Plague Court Murders, is published by John Dickson Carr (at this time resident in England) writing as "Carter Dickson" in New York around early June, followed in December by The White Priory Murders.

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

New books

 * 1) Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie

Awards
James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: Robert Graves, I, Claudius and Claudius the God James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: J. E. Neale, Queen Elizabeth King's Gold Medal for Poetry instituted this year with first winner, Laurence Whistler Newbery Medal for children's literature: Cornelia Meigs, Invincible Louisa Nobel Prize for literature: Luigi Pirandello. Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Sidney Kingsley, Men in White Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Robert Hillyer: Collected Verse Pulitzer Prize for the Novel: Caroline Miller – Lamb in His Bosom