Deaths
- January 5 - Humbert Wolfe, poet and epigrammist (born 1885)
- January 27 - Isaak Babel, Russian journalist and dramatist (born 1894; executed by firing squad)
- February 11 - John Buchan, Scottish novelist (born 1875)
- ] - E. F. Benson, novelist, biographer, memoirist and short story writer (born 1867)
- March 7 - Edwin Markham, poet (born 1852)
- March 10 - Mikhail Bulgakov, Russian novelist and playwright (born 1891)
- March 16
- Selma Lagerlöf, Swedish Nobel laureate (born 1858)
- Sir Thomas Little Heath, historian and translator (born 1861)
- June 10 - Marcus Garvey, journalist and publisher
- June 20 - Charley Chase, screenwriter
- August 7 - T. O'Conor Sloane, editor of Amazing Stories (born 1851)
- September 26 - W. H. Davies, poet and Supertramp (born 1871)
- December 21 - F Scott Fitzgerald (born 1896)
- December 22 - Nathanael West, screenwriter and satirist (born 1903)
Read more about this topic: 1940 In Literature
Famous quotes containing the word deaths:
“I sang of death but had I known
The many deaths one must have died
Before he came to meet his own!”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.”
—Alison Hawthorne Deming (b. 1946)