Calendar of Literary Facts
1958
- James Agee’s A Death in the Family is published
- Brendan Behan publishes Borstal Boy
- Shelagh Delaney publishes A Taste of Honey
- James Agee is posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for A Death in the Family
- Archibald MacLeish’s J. B.: A Play is produced
- Chinua Achebe publishes Things Fall Apart
- Truman Capote publishes Breakfast at Tiffany’s: A Short Novel and Three Stories
- Charles Tomlinson publishes Seeing Is Believing
- John Mortimer publishes Three Plays: The Dock Brief; What Shall We Tell Caroline?; [and] I Spy
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti publishes A Coney Island of the Mind
- Shelby Foote publishes The Civil War: A Narrative
- Jean Genet’s Les Negres: Clownerie (The Blacks: A Clown Show) is produced
- James Reaney publishes A Suit of Nettles
- Kenzaburo Oe publishes Shiiku
- Bernard Malamud publishes The Magic Barrel
- Writing under the pseudonym Curt Cannon, Evan Hunter publishes I’m Cannon—For Hire
- Arthur Miller receives an Obie Award for The Crucible
- Yves Bonnefoy publishes Hier regnant desert
- Stanley Kunitz publishes Selected Poems, 1928-1958
- Ketti Frings receives the Pulitzer Prize in drama for Look Homeward, Angel
- Ezra Pound is released from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, where he had been confined for many years by the U.S. government
- Gregory Corso publishes Gasoline
- John Kenneth Galbraith publishes The Affluent Society
- Mao Tse-tung’s Chinese forces bombard the Nationalist-held coastal islands of Quemoy and Matsu
- Wilhelm Roepke publishes Jenseits von Angebot und Nachfrage (A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market)
- Syria and Egypt form the United Arab Republic
- The National Guard is sent into Little Rock, Arkansas to enforce school desegration
- The U.S. launches the satellite Explorer I
- Boris Pasternak is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but is forbidden by the Soviet government from accepting it
- Salvatore Quasimodo publishes La terre impareggiabile
- Giuseppe Tomassi di Lampedusa publishes Il gattopardo (The Leopard)
- Jorge Amado publishes Gabriela, cravo e canela (Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon)
- Robert Lewis Taylor publishes The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters
- Ian Fleming publishes Doctor No
- James Branch Cabell dies (May 5)
- George Jean Nathan dies (April 8)
- Angelina Weld Grimke dies (June 10)
- Robert W. Service dies (September 11)
- Caryl Phillips is born (March 13)
- Fenton Johnson dies (September 17)
- Roger Martin du Gard dies (August 22)
- Mitch Albom is born (May 23)
- Zoë Akins dies (October 29)
- Juan Ramón Jiménez dies (May 29)
