See also: 1949 in literature, other events of 1950, 1951 in literature, list of years in literature.

Events

• Kazuo Shimada (1907-1996) won the "Mystery Writer Of Japan" award for his book Shakai-bu Kisha (City Reporter)
• Jack Kerouac had his first novel published

New books

• Across the River and Into the Trees - Ernest Hemingway
• The Adventurer - Mika Waltari
• Beetlecreek - William Demby
• Cabbagetown - Hugh Garner
• The Cardinal - Henry Morton Robinson
• The Child Who Never Grew - Pearl S. Buck
• The Disenchanted - Budd Schulberg
• The Door in the Wall - Marguerite de Angeli
• The Town and the City - Jack Kerouac
• Floodtide - Frank Yerby
• Florence Nightingale - Cecil Woodham-Smith
• The Grass Is Singing - Doris Lessing
• I, Robot - Isaac Asimov
• Joy Street - Frances Parkinson Keyes
• Jubilee Trail - Gwen Bristow
• Kon-Tiki - Thor Heyerdahl
• The Liberal Imagination - Lionel Trilling
• The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe - C. S. Lewis
• The Little World of Don Camillo - Giovanni Guareschi
• The Martian Chronicles - Ray Bradbury
• Parade's End - Ford Madox Ford
• The Parasites - Daphne du Maurier
• Reading and Criticism - Raymond Williams
• Star Money - Kathleen Winsor
• Summer In The Country - Edith Templeton
• La vida breve (A Brief Life) - Juan Carlos Onetti
• The Wall - John Hersey

Births

• January 25 - Gloria Naylor, African American author
• July - Zhang Kangkang , Chinese writer
• September 7 - Peggy Noonan, columnist, political writer
• September 20 - James Blaylock, American fantasy author
• October 17 - David Adams Richards, Canadian author
• October 27 - Fran Leibowitz , American writer
• November 2 - Mauri Kunnas , Finnish children’s author writer
• Barbara Gowdy - Canadian novelist
• Susan Eloise Hinton, American author

Deaths

• January 21 – George Orwell, writer
• March 19 – Edgar Rice Burroughs, author
• May 6 - Agnes Smedley, American journalist and writer known for chronicling the Chinese Civil War
• October 19 - Edna St. Vincent Millay, poet
• November 2 - George Bernard Shaw
• November 25 - Johannes Vilhelm Jensen, Danish author

Awards

• Newbery Medal for children's literature: Marguerite de Angeli , The Door in the Wall
• Nobel Prize for Literature: Earl (Bertrand Arthur William) Russell
• Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II, Joshua Logan, South Pacific
• Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: A. B. Guthrie, Jr., The Way West
• Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Gwendolyn Brooks, Annie Allen