See also: 1935 in literature, other events of 1936, 1937 in literature, list of years in literature.

Events

• Life magazine is first published

New books

• The Allegory of Love - C. S. Lewis
• The Big Money - John Dos Passos
• Black Thunder - Arna Wendell Bontemps
• The Brothers Ashkenazi - Israel Joshua Singer
• Caddie Woodlawn - Carol Ryrie Brink
• The Dark Frontier - Eric Ambler
• Dark Metropolis - Arthur Joseph
• Death on the Installment Plan - Louis-Ferdinand Céline
• Drums Along the Mohawk - Walter D. Edmonds
• Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
• The Gray Man Walks - Henry Bellamann
• The House in Paris - Elizabeth Bowen
• In Dubious Battle - John Steinbeck
• Jamaica Inn - Daphne du Maurier
• John Dawn - Robert P. Tristram Coffin
• The Long Night - Andrew Lytle
• Not Under Forty - Willa Cather
• Now that April's Here and Other Stories - Morley Callaghan
• Otto at Sea - William Pène du Bois
• Quel homme es-tu - André Billy
• We The Living - Ayn Rand

Births

• January 22 - Joseph Wambaugh, author
• November 20 - Don DeLillo, United States author

Deaths

• January 18 - Rudyard Kipling, British writer - Nobel prize for literature (1907)
• June 11 - Robert E. Howard, American fantasy writer (suicide)
• June 14 - Gilbert Keith Chesterton, author
• Grazia Deledda, Sardinian (Italy) writer - Nobel prize for literature (1926)

Awards

• Newbery Medal for children's literature: Carol Ryrie Brink, Caddie Woodlawn
• Nobel Prize for literature: Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
• Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Robert E. Sherwood, Idiots Delight
• Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Robert P. Tristram Coffin : Strange Holiness
• Pulitzer Prize for the Novel: Harold L. Davis - Honey in the Horn