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The year 1950 in literature involved some significant events and new books.

Events

• Kazuo Shimada (1907–1996) wins the "Mystery Writer Of Japan" award for his book Shakai-bu Kisha (City Reporter).
• Jack Kerouac has his first novel published.
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is sent to a "special camp" for political prisoners in Kazakhstan
• Dalton Trumbo co-writes the script of Gun Crazy under the pseudonym Millard Kaufman because of his imprisonment for contempt of court.
• Adrian Bell begins writing his Countryman’s Notebook column in the Eastern Daily Press.

New books

• Marguerite de Angeli - The Door in the Wall
• Isaac Asimov - I, Robot
• Ray Bradbury - The Martian Chronicles
• Gwen Bristow - Jubilee Trail
• Pearl S. Buck - The Child Who Never Grew
• John Dickson Carr
  • The Bride of Newgate
  • Night at the Mocking Widow (as by Carter Dickson)
• Agatha Christie
  • A Murder is Announced
  • Three Blind Mice and Other Stories
• William Cooper - Scenes from Provincial Life
• A. J. Cronin - The Spanish Gardener
• L. Sprague de Camp and P. Schuyler Miller - Genus Homo
• L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt - The Castle of Iron
• Daphne du Maurier - The Parasites
• Ford Madox Ford - Parade's End
• Hugh Garner - Cabbagetown
• Frank Gilbreth, Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey - Belles on Their Toes
• Giovanni Guareschi - The Little World of Don Camillo
• Frank Hardy - Power Without Glory
• Ernest Hemingway - Across the River and Into the Trees
• John Hersey - The Wall
• Robert E. Howard - Conan the Conqueror
• Jack Kerouac - The Town and the City
• Frances Parkinson Keyes - Joy Street
• Doris Lessing - The Grass Is Singing
• C. S. Lewis - The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
• Rose Macaulay - The World My Wilderness
• Juan Carlos Onetti - La vida breve (A Brief Life)
• Cesare Pavese - La Luna e i Falò
• Barbara Pym - Some Tame Gazelle
• Ellery Queen - Double, Double
• Conrad Richter - The Town
• Henry Morton Robinson - The Cardinal
• Cezaro Rossetti - Kredu min, sinjorino!
• Budd Schulberg - The Disenchanted
• Rex Stout - Three Doors to Death
• Rex Stout - In the Best Families
• Edith Templeton - Summer In The Country
• James Thurber - The 13 Clocks
• A. E. van Vogt - The Voyage of the Space Beagle
• Mika Waltari - The Adventurer
• Evelyn Waugh - Helena
• Kathleen Winsor - Star Money
• Frank Yerby - Floodtide

New drama

• Bertolt Brecht - The Tutor
• Christopher Fry - Venus Observed
• Kermit Hunter - Unto These Hills
• William Inge - Come Back, Little Sheba
• Eugène Ionesco - The Bald Soprano

Short stories

• Damon Knight - "To Serve Man"

Poetry

• Leah Bodine Drake - A Hornbook for Witches
• Pablo Neruda - Canto General

Non-fiction

• Roland Bainton - Here I Stand:A Life of Martin Luther
• E. H. Gombrich - The Story of Art
• Thor Heyerdahl - Kon-Tiki
• Lionel Trilling - The Liberal Imagination
• Raymond Williams - Reading and Criticism
• Cecil Woodham-Smith - Florence Nightingale

Births

• January 25 - Gloria Naylor, African American author
• February 11 - Mauri Kunnas, Finnish children’s 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
• Barbara Gowdy - Canadian novelist
• Susan Eloise Hinton, American author

Deaths

• January 5 - Basil Williams, historian
• January 21 – George Orwell, novelist
• February 13 - Rafael Sabatini, novelist
• February 24 - Irving Bacheller, journalist and writer
• March 19 – Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan author
• May 6 - Agnes Smedley, American journalist and writer known for chronicling the Chinese Civil War
• May 11 - Alfred O. Andersson, newspaper publisher
• May 13 - F. E. Compton, publisher of reference books
• September 6 - Olaf Stapledon, philosopher and science-fiction author
• October 9 - Nicolai Hartmann, philosopher
• October 19 - Edna St. Vincent Millay, poet
• November 2 - George Bernard Shaw
• November 25 - Johannes Vilhelm Jensen, Danish author
• December 28 - Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, short-story writer
• December 31 - Xavier Villaurrutia, poet and dramatist
• date unknown
  • John Mooney, Orkney historian
  • Cezaro Rossetti, Esperanto writer
  • Helen Rowland, journalist and humorist
  • Cuthbert Whitaker, editor of Whitaker's Almanack

Awards

• James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: Robert Henriques, Through the Valley
• James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: Cecil Woodham-Smith, Florence Nightingale
• Newbery Medal for children's literature: Marguerite de Angeli, The Door in the Wall
• Newdigate prize: John Bayley
• Nobel Prize for Literature: Earl (Bertrand Arthur William) Russell
• Premio Nadal: Elena Quiroga, Viento norte'’
• 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