Calendar of Literary Facts
1938
- Daphne Du Maurier publishes Rebecca
- Elizabeth Bowen publishes The Death of the Heart
- Allen Tate publishes The Fathers
- P. G. Wodehouse publishes The Code of the Woosters
- Southern Slovakia is annexed by Hungary
- Neville Chamberlain appeases Adolf Hitler at the Munich Conference, allowing Germany to occupy Sudetenland unopposed; Chamberelain announces he has achieved “peace in our time”
- Germany unites with Austria: the Anschluss
- Emlyn Williams publishes The Corn Is Green
- Pearl S. Buck receives the Nobel Prize for Literature
- Antonin Artaud’s Le Theatre et son double is produced
- Jean-Paul Sartre publishes La Nausee (Nausea)
- Marya Zaturenska receives the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Cold Morning Sky
- Louis Aragon publishes Les beaux quartiers (Residential Quarter)
- John Gould Fletcher publishes Selected Poems
- Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is produced
- Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings publishes The Yearling
- Nicholasa Mohr is born (November 1)
- Colleen McCullough is born (June 1)
- D. L. Coburn is born (August 4)
- John Guare is born (February 5)
- Ngugi wa Thiong’o is born (January 5)
- Kristallnacht (“night of broken glass”) begins a compaign of government-approved anti-Jewish violence in Germany, Austria, and Sudetenland (November 9)
- Charles Simic is born (May 9)
- Judy Blume is born (February 12)
- 26,000 German Jews are arrested and sent by the Nazis to concentration camps (November 12)
- Compulsory expropriation of Jewish businesses, shops, and industries becomes lawful in Germany, after the enactment of a decree on “Aryanization” (December 13)
- Leonardo Boff is born (December 14)
- César Vallejo dies (April 15)
- Thomas Wolfe dies (September 15)
- Robert Lipsyte is born (January 16)
- Joyce Carol Oates is born (June 16)
- Les A. Murray is born (October 17)
- Renata Adler is born (October 19)
- Bernice Zamora is born (January 20)
- Ishmael Scott Reed is born (February 22)
- Lawrence Block is born (June 24)
- Frederick Forsyth is born (August 25)
- Raymond Carver is born (May 25)
- Karel Čapek dies (December 25)
- Alfonsina Storni dies (October 25)
- Luisa Valenzuela is born (November 26)
- Gertrude Bonnin dies (January 26)
- James Weldon Johnson dies (June 26)
- Zona Gale dies (December 27)
- Ron Milner is born (May 29)
- Larry Niven is born (April 30)
- Orson Welles’s Halloween Eve radio broadcast describing in realistic fashion a Martian invasion of the Earth, based upon H. G. Wells's novel The War of the Worlds, terrifies many radio listeners throughout the United States (October 30)
