Calendar of Literary Facts

• Calendar of Literary Facts

Calendar of Literary Facts

1941

• Edmund Wilson publishes The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature
• The publication of John Crowe Ransom’s The New Criticism unofficially founds the movement of that name
• Hitler betrays Stalin; German forces smash their way into Russia and besiege Leningrad
• Soviet/Japanese Non-aggression Pact is signed
• Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill sign the Atlantic Charter
• U.S. enacts “Lend-Lease” bill, begins supplying arms and matériel to Great Britain
• Ellen Glasgow publishes In This Our Life
• Leonard Bacon receives the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Sunderland Capture
• James Agee publishes Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with photographs by Walker Evans
• Helen MacInnes publishes Above Suspicion
• Having been released from Geman custody, P. G. Wodehouse records the first of five controversial broadcast talks from Berlin, describing his recent incarceration in humorous terms
• William Alexander Percy publishes Lanterns on the Levee
• Sinclair Ross publishes As for Me and My House
• William Attaway publishes Blood on the Forge
• William Rose Benét publishes The Dust Which Is God
• Bertolt Brecht’s Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reichs (Fear and Misery in the Third Reich) is produced
• Robert Hass is born (March 1)
• Henri Bergson dies (January 3)
• Anne Rice is born (October 4)
• Spalding Gray is born (June 5)
• Sir Rabindranath Tagore dies (August 7)
• J. G. Frazer dies (May 7)
• Japanese planes destroy the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, bringing the U.S. into World War II; the Axis powers declare war on the U.S. (December 7)
• Sherwood Anderson dies (March 8)
• Paul Theroux is born (April 10)
• James Joyce dies (January 13)
• John Edgar Wideman is born (June 14)
• Isaak (Emmanuilovich) Babel dies (March 17)
• Fannie Flagg is born (September 21)
• Max Apple is born (October 22)
• Anne Tyler is born (October 25)
• Simon J. Ortiz is born (May 27)
• Virginia Woolf dies (March 28)
• Ricardo Sanchez is born (March 29)
• Ron Arias is born (November 30)
• German Luftwaffe Commander in Chief Hermann Goering directs Reinhard Heydrich, head of Reich Security, to enact the “Final Solution:” the extermination of all European Jews by the Nazis (July 31)