Calendar of Literary Facts
1920
- Lawrence Sanders is born
- Knut Hamsun receives the Nobel Prize for Literature
- Sherwood Anderson publishes Poor White
- Floyd Dell publishes Moon-Calf
- Karel Čapek publishes R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots
- Alfonsina Storni publishes Languidez
- Station KDKA in Pittsburgh makes the first commercial radio broadcast
- Angelina Weld Grimke publishes Rachel
- Katherine Mansfield publishes Bliss, and Other Stories
- The Freeman is founded by Albert Jay Nock, who edits the magazine until it folds in 1924
- Mohandas K. Gandhi publishes Swaraj and Non-Cooperation
- The Eighteenth Amendment is enacted, oulawing the manufacture, sale, and consumption of alcoholic beverages in the U.S; the Prohibition Era sees the rise of organized crime, as opportunistic gangsters manufacture and sell spirits to a willing public
- Zona Gale publishes Miss Lulu Bett
- Grazia Deledda publishes La madre (The Mother)
- Edith Wharton publishes The Age of Innocence
- Sinclair Lewis publishes Main Street
- Edward Thomas’s Collected Poems is published
- J. Thomas Looney publishes “Shakespeare” Identified in Edward De Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, and the Poems of Edward De Vere, the founding document of Oxfordian Shakespeare scholarship
- Sigrid Undset publishes Kristin Lavransdatter
- F. Scott Fitzgerald publishes This Side of Paradise
- Tristan Tzara publishes La coeur a gaz (The Gas Heart)
- Edna St. Vincent Millay publishes A Few Figs From Thistles: Poems and Four Sonnets
- Colette publishes Cheri
- Eugene O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon is produced
- Jacques Maritain publishes Art et scolastique (Art and Scholasticism)
- Wilfred Owen’s Poems is published
- Paul Valéry publishes Le Cimetiere marin (The Graveyard by the Sea) in the periodical Nouvelle Revue Française (June 1)
- Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Society holds its national convention in New York (August 1)
- Howard Nemerov is born (March 1)
- Isaac Asimov is born (January 2)
- Phyllis Dorothy James White (P. D. James) is born (August 3)
- Arthur Hailey is born (April 5)
- Joao Cabral de Melo Neto is born (January 6)
- Frank Herbert is born (October 8)
- Richard Adams is born (May 9)
- Alex Comfort is born (February 10)
- William Dean Howells dies (May 10)
- Alice Childress is born (October 12)
- Rosemary Sutcliff is born (December 14)
- Mario Benedetti is born (September 14)
- Mario Puzo is born (October 15)
- Amy Clampitt is born (June 15)
- Charles Bukowski is born (August 16)
- Amos Tutuola is born (June 20)
- Ray Bradbury is born (August 22)
- Timothy Leary is born (October 22)
- Paul Antschel is born (November 23)
- Dick Francis is born (October 31)