Calendar of Literary Facts
1951
- Marianne Moore publishes Collected Poems
- Samuel Beckett publishes Malone meurt (Malone Dies)
- Carl Sandburg receives the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for his Complete Poems
- Camilo José Cela publishes Caminos inciertos: la colmena (The Hive,)
- Libya becomes an independent nation
- The Korean War is waged between the Communist-Chinese backed North and the U.N.-backed South; the war ends in a stalemate
- Hortense Calisher publishes In the Absence of Angels
- Paer Lagerkvist receives the Nobel Prize for Literature
- War in Vietnam is waged between the French colonialists and the Viet-Minh
- William F. Buckley Jr. publishes God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom”
- Adrienne Rich publishes A Change of World
- Color television debuts in the United States
- Marguerite Yourcenar publishes Memoires d’Hadrien (Memoirs of Hadrian)
- J. D. Salinger publishes The Catcher in the Rye
- Langston Hughes publishes Montage of a Dream Deferred
- Arthur C. Clarke publishes The Exploration of Space
- Morley Callaghan publishes The Loved and the Lost
- Nicholas Monsarrat publishes The Cruel Sea
- Jacques Maritain publishes Man and the State
- Hannah Arendt publishes The Origins of Totalitarianism (published in the U.K. as Burden of Our Time)
- Conrad Richter receives the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The Town
- Wyndham Lewis publishes Rotting Hill
- Francis King publishes The Dividing Stream
- Robert Harling is born
- Herman Wouk publishes The Caine Mutiny
- Timothy Zahn is born (September 1)
- Tomson Highway is born (December 6)
- Joy Harjo is born (May 9)
- Jorie Graham is born (May 9)
- Sinclair Lewis dies (January 10)
- Frank Peretti is born (January 13)
- Mark Stevens is born (August 14)
- Paula Vogel is born (November 16)
- Terry McMillan is born (October 18)
- André Gide dies (February 19)
- Paul Muldoon is born (June 20)
- Roberto G. Fernandez is born (September 24)
- Orson Scott Card is born (August 24)
- Oscar Hijuelos is born (August 24)
