A page in progress; movies and musical compositions dates by their premier performances, written works by their publication dates
1939
🎞 Stagecoach (2 February)
📚 Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (6 February)
📚 T. S. Eliot, The Family Reunion (21 March)
🎞 Wuthering Heights (13 April)
♫ Billie Holiday, “Strange Fruit” (recorded 20 April)
📚 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (4 May)
♫ Ralph Vaughan Williams, “Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus” (10 June)
🎞 Rules of the Game (7 July)
🎞 The Wizard of Oz (25 August)
📚 W. H. Auden, “September 1, 1939” (8 October)
🎞 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (17 October)
🎞 Gone with the Wind (15 December)
📚 Norbert Elias, Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation
📚 Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds
1940
🎞 First Tom & Jerry cartoon (10 February)
🎞 Pinocchio (23 February)
🎞 Rebecca (21 March)
📚 T. S. Eliot, “East Coker” (Easter)
🎞 First Bugs Bunny cartoon (27 July)
📚 W. H. Auden, Another Time
📚 Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture
♫ Duke Ellington, “Do Nothing till You Hear from Me” and “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore”
🎞 The Great Dictator (15 October)
🎞 Fantasia (13 November)
🎞 The Philadelphia Story (26 December)
📚 Simone Weil, “L’Iliade ou le poème de la force”
📚 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais in the History of Realism (completed but unpublished)
📚 C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
1941
♫ Bartók, String Quartet No. 6 (20 January)
📚 T. S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages” (February)
🎞 The Lady Eve (25 February)
🎞 Citizen Kane (1 May)
♫ Billie Holiday, “God Bless the Child” (recorded 9 May)
📚 C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (serialized May-November)
📻 C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (first talks in August)
📚 W. H. Auden, The Double Man
🎞 Suspicion (14 November)
📻 Dorothy Sayers, The Man Born to be King (broadcasts begun 21 December)
🎞 Sullivan’s Travels (29 December)
♫ Shostakovich, Symphony No. 7 (completed December, though not premiered until March 1942)
