Calendar of Literary Facts

• Calendar of Literary Facts

Calendar of Literary Facts

1940

• The U.S. Congress passes the Smith Act, a peacetime sedition act which provides criminal penalties for advocating the overthrow of the American government
• Upton Sinclair introduces his fictional character Lanny Budd, the hero of a series of eleven novels, in World’s End
• Cyril Connolly founds the distinguished literary periodical Horizon
• Raymond Chandler publishes Farewell, My Lovely
• John O’Hara publishes Pal Joey
• Thomas Harris is born
• John Steinbeck receives the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The Grapes of Wrath
• Ernest Hemingway publishes For Whom the Bell Tolls
• E. J. Pratt publishes Brebeuf and His Brethren
• Richard Wright publishes Native Son
• William Saroyan receives the Pulitzer Prize in drama for The Time of Your Life (declined)
• Graham Greene publishes The Labyrinthine Ways
• Bernard Pomerance is born
• Thomas Wolfe’s novel You Can’t Go Home Again is published
• Arthur Koestler publishes Darkness at Noon
• Winston Churchill becomes British Prime Minister, succeeding Neville Chamberlain
• Mark Van Doren receives the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Collected Poems, 1922-1928
• Robert E. Sherwood’s Roosevelt and Hopkins is produced
• E. E. Cummings publishes 50 Poems
• Maria Campbell is born
• Leonard Bacon publishes Sunderland Capture
• Nelson Algren publishes The Man with the Golden Arm
• Christina Stead publishes The Man Who Loved Children
• Adolfo Bioy Casares publishes La invencion de Morel (The Invention of Morel)
• Kenneth Rexroth publishes In What Hour
• Robin Cook is born (May 4)
• David Plante is born (March 4)
• Jon Anderson is born (July 4)
• Gao Xingjian is born (January 4)
• Angela Carter is born (May 7)
• Peter Benchley is born (May 8)
• J. M. Coetzee is born (February 9)
• David Rabe is born (March 10)
• Marcus Garvey dies (June 10)
• Mikhail Bulgakov dies (March 10)
• John Buchan dies (February 11)
• Robert J. Conley is born (July 11)
• Victor E. Villasenor is born (May 11)
• Bruce Chatwin is born (September 13)
• Edmund White is born (January 13)
• Susan Howatch is born (July 14)
• Jeffrey Archer is born (April 15)
• Selma Lagerlöf dies (March 16)
• Mark Medoff is born (March 18)
• James Welch is born (June 19)
• Verner von Heidenstam dies (May 20)
• Robert Pinsky is born (October 20)
• F. Scott Fitzgerald dies (December 21)
• P. G. Wodehouse, living at villa in Le Touquet, France, is arrested and interned by German occupation forces, as are all English nationals under the age of 60 (July 21)
• The Auschwitz concentration camp is established in Poland (May 22)
• Joseph Brodsky is born (May 24)
• Sue Grafton is born (August 24)
• Frank Chin is born (February 25)
• Luis Valdez is born (June 26)
• Bharati Mukherjee is born (July 27)
• Maxine Hong Kingston is born (October 27)
• Russell Banks is born (March 28)
• Maeve Binchy is born (May 28)
• Robert E. Sherwood’s drama There Shall Be No Night is first performed (April 29)