Calendar of Literary Facts
1959
- Helen Fielding is born
- José Antonio Villarreal publishes Pocho
- Günter Grass publishes Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum)
- Sheila Watson publishes The Double Hook
- William F. Buckley Jr. publishes Up from Liberalism
- The U.S. Postmaster General pronounces D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover an obscene work and bans it from the U.S. mail; this ban is lifted in 1960
- Robert Noyce develops the first microchip
- Soviet spacecraft Lunik reaches the moon
- Louis and Mary Leakey discover the fossil remains of the hominid Zinjanthropus boisei which are 1.75 million years old
- Robert Lewis Taylor receives the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters
- Stanley Kunitz receives the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Selected Poems: 1928-1958
- Salvatore Quasimodo receives the Nobel Prize for Literature
- Allen Drury publishes Advise and Consent
- Saul Bellow publishes Henderson the Rain King
- Yasmina Reza is born
- C. P. Snow publishes The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution
- Ian Fleming publishes Goldfinger
- Marie-Claire Blais publishes La Belle bete (Mad Shadows)
- William S. Burroughs publishes The Naked Lunch
- Hugh MacLennan receives the Governor General’s Literary Award in fiction for The Watch That Ends the Night
- Philip Roth publishes Goodbye, Columbus, and Five Short Stories
- John Arden publishes Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance: An Unhistorical Parable
- Grace Paley publishes The Little Disturbances of Man: Stories of Women and Men at Love
- Laurie Lee publishes Cider with Rosie
- Irving Layton publishes A Red Carpet for the Sun
- Arthur Adamov publishes Ping-pong
- Paule Marshall publishes Brown Girl, Brownstones
- Fidel Castro publishes History Will Absolve Me
- David Caute publishes At Fever Pitch
- Eugene Ionesco’s Le Rhinoceros (Rhinoceros) is produced
- Sidney Sheldon publishes Redhead
- Irving Layton receives the Governor General’s Award for A Red Carpet for the Sun
- W. D. Snodgrass publishes Heart’s Needle
- Archibald MacLeish receives the Pulitzer Prize in drama for J. B.: A Play in Verse
- René Marqués publishes Teatro
- Odysseus Elytis publishes To axion esti The Axion Esti of Odysseus Elytis
- Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun is produced
- Raymond Chandler dies (May 26)
- Jeanette Winterson is born (August 27)
- William T. Vollmann is born (July 28)
- Maxwell Anderson dies (February 28)
