Calendar of Literary Facts
1903
- Henry James publishes The Ambassadors
- Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh is published
- Orville and Wilbur Wright fly the first motorized airplane at Kitty Hawk (actually Kill Devil Hills), North Carolina
- Henry Ford founds the Ford Motor Company
- One of the earliest motion pictures, The Great Train Robbery, is released
- Jack London publishes The Call of the Wild
- Joseph Seamon Cotter Sr. publishes Caleb, the Degenerate; A Play in Four Acts: A Study of the Types, Customs, and Needs of the American Negro
- Anti-Jewish pogroms break out in Russia
- The reformist Social Democratic Party in Russia splits into two factions: the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks
- W. E. B. Du Bois publishes The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches
- Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson receives the Nobel Prize for Literature
- Paul Horgan is born (August 1)
- Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen dies (November 1)
- Benjamin Spock is born (May 2)
- Marguerite Yourcenar is born (June 8)
- Phyllis A. Whitney is born (September 9)
- Cyril Connolly is born (September 10)
- William Ernest Henley dies (July 11)
- Alan Paton is born (January 11)
- Lorine Niedecker is born (May 12)
- Georges Simenon is born (February 13)
- Irving Stone is born (July 14)
- Erskine Caldwell is born (December 17)
- James Gould Cozzens is born (August 19)
- Anaïs Nin is born (February 21)
- Morley Callaghan is born (February 22)
- Malcolm Muggeridge is born (March 24)
- Eric Blair (George Orwell) is born (June 25)
- Caroline Pafford (Miller) is born (August 26)
- Evelyn Waugh is born (October 28)
- John D. Voelker is born (June 29)
- Countee Cullen is born (May 30)
