February 22 – The Austrian-born novelist Stefan Zweig and his wife Lotte are found dead of a barbiturateoverdose in their home in Petrópolis, Brazil, leaving notes indicating despair at the future of European civilization. The manuscript of Zweig's autobiography The World of Yesterday, posted to his publisher a day earlier, is first published in Stockholm later in the year as Die Welt von Gestern.[3]
March 28 – The Spanish poet Miguel Hernández dies of tuberculosis as a political prisoner in a prison hospital, having scrawled his last verse on the wall.
June 12 – Anne Frank, on her 13th birthday, makes the first entry in her new diary in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam.
August – The French Resistance unit to which expatriate Irish writer Samuel Beckett belongs is betrayed. He has to flee from occupied Paris on foot to Roussillon, Vaucluse in south-eastern France, where he continues work on his novel Watt.
November 19 – The Polish Jewish writer and artist Bruno Schulz is shot dead by a Gestapo officer, while walking through the "Aryan quarter" of his home town, Drohobych.