See also: 1928 in literature, other events of 1929, 1930 in literature, list of years in literature.

Events

• Candide by Voltaire was declared obscene by the United States Customs and seized in 1930.

• A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes is published.

• A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway is published.

• The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner is published.

New Books

• Bambi - Felix Salten
• Banjo - Claude McKay
• The Blacker the Berry - Wallace Thurman
• Brown on Resolution - C.S. Forester
• Borgia - Zona Gale
• A Charmed Circle - Anna Kavan
• The Dark Journey - Julian Green
• Dodsworth - Sinclair Lewis
• Everlasting Man - G. K. Chesterton
• A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway
• Flowering Judas - Katherine Anne Porter
• Goodbye to All That - Robert Graves
• A High Wind in Jamaica - Richard Hughes
• Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) - Erich Maria Remarque
• In the Wilderness - Sigrid Undset
• The Innocent Voyage - Richard Hughes
• Kiki's Memoirs - Kiki
• Les Enfants Terribles - Jean Cocteau
• Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe
• The Magnificent Obsession - Lloyd C. Douglas
• The Mind Reader - Walter A. Roberts
• The Near and the Far - Leopold Myers
• Passing - Nella Larsen
• Peder Victorious - O.E. Rolvaag
• The Poisoned Chocolates Case - Anthony Berkeley
• A Preface to Morals - Walter Lippmann
• The Roman Hat Mystery - Ellery Queen
• The Romantic Adventures of Rosy, The Octoroon; With Some Account of the Persecution of the Southern Negro During the Reconstruction Period - Albert Evander Coleman
• A Room of One's Own - Virginia Woolf
• Rope (novel) - Patrick Hamilton
• The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
• The Trumpeter of Krakow - Eric P. Kelly

Births

• January 26 - Jules Feiffer, cartoonist, writer
• February 17 - Chaim Potok, author (+ 2002)

Deaths

• June 8 - Bliss Carman, poet
• June 25 – Georges Courteline, dramatist and novelist

Awards

• Newbery Medal for children's literature: Eric P. Kelly, The Trumpeter of Krakow
• Nobel Prize in literature: Thomas Mann
• Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Elmer L. Rice, Street Scene
• Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Stephen Vincent Benet: John Brown's Body
• Pulitzer Prize for the Novel: Julia Peterkin - Scarlet Sister Mary