Calendar of Literary Facts

• Calendar of Literary Facts

Calendar of Literary Facts

1950

• Ray A. Young Bear is born
• Doris Lessing publishes The Grass Is Singing
• Theater of the Absurd flourishes in Western drama
• Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy conducts hearings intended to detect communist penetration of American government and academia; for his recklessness, he is censured by the U.S. Senate in 1954
• South African opponents of apartheid are banned from attending schools, universities, and public meetings
• Chinese forces invade and occupy Tibet
• A. B. Guthrie Jr. receives the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The Way West
• Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II, and Joshua Logan receive the Pulitzer Prize in drama for South Pacific
• Gwendolyn Brooks receives the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Annie Allen
• Damon Knight publishes two of his best-known stories, “To Serve Man” and “Not with a Bang”
• Bertrand Russell receives the Nobel Prize for Literature
• S. Y. Agnon publishes Edo ve-Enam (Two Tales: Betrothes [and] Edo and Enam)
• Conrad Richter publishes The Town
• Lionel Trilling publishes his first essay collection, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society
• Sidney Sheldon’s Annie Get Your Gun is produced
• Carl Sandburg publishes Complete Poems
• James Boswell’s Boswell’s London Journal, 1762-1763 is published
• Ray Bradbury publishes The Martian Chronicles
• Heinrich Boell publishes Wanderer, kommst du nach Spa (Traveller, If You Come to Spa)
• Gwendolyn Brooks receives Pulitzer Prize in poetry
• Paer Lagerkvist publishes Barabbas
• Kenneth Millar publishes The Drowning Pool
• C. S. Lewis publishes The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (first in the “Chronicles of Narnia” series)
• L. Ron Hubbard publishes Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health
• S. E. Hinton is born
• William Demby publishes Beetlecreek
• Ralph J. Bunche receives Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the 1949 armistice between Arab and Israeli states
• Bernard Shaw dies (November 2)
• William Rose Benét dies (May 4)
• Eileen Goudge is born (July 4)
• Edgar Lee Masters dies (March 6)
• David Bradley Jr. is born (September 7)
• Ernest Poole dies (January 10)
• David Adams Richards is born (June 15)
• Henry Louis Gates Jr. is born (September 16)
• Black Elk dies (August 17)
• Wendy Wasserstein is born (October 18)
• Edna St. Vincent Millay dies (October 19)
• Edgar Rice Burroughs dies (March 19)
• John Gould Fletcher dies (May 20)
• A jury finds Alger Hiss, accused by Whittaker Chambers of spying for the Soviets, guilty of perjury (January 21)
• Ralph J. Bunche, a black American, wins the Nobel Peace Prize (September 22)
• Irving Bacheller dies (February 24)
• Johannes V. Jensen dies (November 25)
• George Orwell dies (January 25)
• Gloria Naylor is born (January 25)
• Julia Alvarez is born (March 27)
• Carolyn Forche is born (April 28)