See also: 1927 in literature, other events of 1928, 1929 in literature, list of years in literature.

Events

• Ford Madox Ford publishes Last Post. It is the final book of a four-volume work titled Parade's End published between 1924 and 1928.
• Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley is published.

New books

• All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque
• An American Comedy - Harold Lloyd, autobiography
• Ashenden - W. Somerset Maugham
• Bambi, A Life In The Woods - Felix Salten
• The Barnard Letters - Anthony Powell
• Beneath Tropic Seas - Charles William Beebe
• Coming of Age in Samoa - Margaret Mead
• Confessions Of A Negro Preacher - Anonymous
• Crescendo - Henry Bellamann
• Dark Princess - W. E. B. DuBois
• Daughter of Allah - F. Elliott Durant & Cuthbert Roach
• Decline and Fall - Evelyn Waugh
• The Eternal Moment and Other Stories - E. M. Forster
• Gay Neck - Dhan Gopal Mukerji
• Home To Harlem - Claude McKay
• Hunting for Hidden Gold - Franklin W. Dixon
• Lady Chatterley's Lover - D.H. Lawrence
• Last Post - Ford Madox Ford
• Lord Peter Views the Body - Dorothy L. Sayers
• The Masqueraders – Georgette Heyer
• Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man - Siegfried Sassoon
• A Mirror for Witches - Esther Forbes
• Mr Blettsworthy on Rampole Island - H. G. Wells
• The Open Conspiracy - H. G. Wells
• Origins of the World War - Sidney Bradshaw Fay
• Orlando: A Biography - Virginia Woolf
• Plum Bun, A Novel Without a Moral - Jessie Redmond Fauset
• Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley
• Politicians and the War - Max Aitken
• Quicksand - Nella Larsen
• The Sacred Flame (play) - William Somerset Maugham
• Strange Fugitive - Morley Callaghan
• The Walls of Jericho - Rudolph Fisher
• The Well of Loneliness - Radclyffe Hall

Births

• January 7 - William Peter Blatty, screenwriter
• January 8 - Sander Vanocur , journalist
• January 16 - William Kennedy, author
• January 24 - Desmond Morris, anthropologist, writer
• February 5 - Andrew Greeley, priest, novelist
• February 9 - Frank Frazetta, illustrator
• February 9 - Roger Mudd, journalist
• November 9 - Anne Sexton, poet
• December 16 - Philip K. Dick, novelist

Deaths

• January 11 - Thomas Hardy, writer
• March 24 - Charlotte Mew, poet

Awards

• Newbery Medal for children's literature: Dhan Gopal Mukerji, Gayneck, the Story of a Pigeon
• Nobel Prize for Literature: Sigrid Undset
• Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Eugene O'Neill, Strange Interlude
• Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Edwin Arlington Robinson, Tristram
• Pulitzer Prize for the Novel: Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey