Calendar of Literary Facts
1945
- E. B. White publishes Stuart Little
- Earle Birney publishes Now Is Time
- American B-29s drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
- Gabrielle Roy publishes Bonheur d’occasion (The Tin Flute)
- George Orwell publishes Animal Farm
- Gabriela Mistral receives the Nobel Prize for Literature
- James Thurber publishes The Thurber Carnival
- German forces surrender in May; Japanese forces surrender in September; World War II ends
- First atomic bomb is detonated near Alamagordo, New Mexico
- The United Nations is founded at a conference in San Francisco
- Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. publishes The Age of Jackson
- Ezra Pound is arrested by Italian partisans and U.S. Army personnel for wartime radio broadcasts from fascist Italy; judged mentally unfit to stand trial, he is incarcerated in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, Washington, D.C.
- Mary Chase receives the Pulitzer Prize in drama for Harvey
- Bertrand Russell publishes A History of Western Philosophy
- Ivo Andrič publishes Gospojica (The Women of Sarajevo)
- Ivo Andrič publishes Travnicka hronika (Bosnian Chronicle)
- Adam Clayton Powell Jr. publishes Marching Blacks: An Interpretive History of the Rise of the Black Common Man
- John Hersey receives the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for A Bell for Adano
- Pat Booth is born
- Chester Himes publishes If He Hollers, Let Him Go
- Jacques Roumain’s Bois d’ebene (Ebony Wood) is published
- Karl Shapiro receives the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for V-Letter and Other Poems
- Leopold Sedar Senghor publishes Chants d’ombre
- Anne Frank dies
- Evelyn Waugh publishes Brideshead Revisited
- Jean-Paul Sartre publishes Huis-clos (No Exit)
- Hugh MacLennan publishes Two Solitudes
- Hanay Geiogamah is born
- Franklin Roosevelt, Josef Stalin, and Winston Churchill meet at Yalta in the Crimea (February 4)
- John Banville is born (December 8)
- Dean Koontz is born (July 9)
- Hatcher Hughes dies (October 18)
- Albert Jay Nock dies (August 19)
- Robert Olen Butler is born (January 20)
- Ellen Glasgow dies (November 21)
- Michael Cristofer is born (January 22)
- The Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunal begins, with Nazi leaders put on trial for crimes against humanity (November 22)
- Nuruddin Farah is born (November 24)
- Shiva Naipaul is born (February 25)
- Pat Conroy is born (October 26)
- August Wilson is born (April 27)
- Theodore Dreiser dies (December 28)
- S. E. K. Mqhayi dies (July 29)
- Annie Dillard is born (April 30)
- Michael Anthony Dorris is born (January 30)
