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)