Calendar of Literary Facts

1941

  • Edmund Wilson publishes The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature
  • The publication of John Crowe Ransom’s The New Criticism unofficially founds the movement of that name
  • Hitler betrays Stalin; German forces smash their way into Russia and besiege Leningrad
  • Soviet/Japanese Non-aggression Pact is signed
  • Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill sign the Atlantic Charter
  • U.S. enacts “Lend-Lease” bill, begins supplying arms and matériel to Great Britain
  • Ellen Glasgow publishes In This Our Life
  • Leonard Bacon receives the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Sunderland Capture
  • James Agee publishes Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with photographs by Walker Evans
  • Helen MacInnes publishes Above Suspicion
  • Having been released from Geman custody, P. G. Wodehouse records the first of five controversial broadcast talks from Berlin, describing his recent incarceration in humorous terms
  • William Alexander Percy publishes Lanterns on the Levee
  • Sinclair Ross publishes As for Me and My House
  • William Attaway publishes Blood on the Forge
  • William Rose Benét publishes The Dust Which Is God
  • Bertolt Brecht’s Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reichs (Fear and Misery in the Third Reich) is produced
  • Robert Hass is born (March 1)
  • Henri Bergson dies (January 3)
  • Anne Rice is born (October 4)
  • Spalding Gray is born (June 5)
  • Sir Rabindranath Tagore dies (August 7)
  • J. G. Frazer dies (May 7)
  • Japanese planes destroy the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, bringing the U.S. into World War II; the Axis powers declare war on the U.S. (December 7)
  • Sherwood Anderson dies (March 8)
  • Paul Theroux is born (April 10)
  • James Joyce dies (January 13)
  • John Edgar Wideman is born (June 14)
  • Isaak (Emmanuilovich) Babel dies (March 17)
  • Fannie Flagg is born (September 21)
  • Max Apple is born (October 22)
  • Anne Tyler is born (October 25)
  • Simon J. Ortiz is born (May 27)
  • Virginia Woolf dies (March 28)
  • Ricardo Sanchez is born (March 29)
  • Ron Arias is born (November 30)
  • German Luftwaffe Commander in Chief Hermann Goering directs Reinhard Heydrich, head of Reich Security, to enact the “Final Solution:” the extermination of all European Jews by the Nazis (July 31)