Calendar of Literary Facts
1953
- Roland Barthes publishes Le Degre zero de l’ecriture (Writing Degree Zero)
- Yves Bonnefoy publishes Din mouvement et de l’immobilite de Douve (On the Motion and Immobility of Douve)
- Paddy Chayefsky completes his teleplay Marty
- Heinrich Boell publishes Und sagte kein einziges Wort (And Never Said a Word)
- The Journal of Charlotte L. Forten is published
- Russell Kirk publishes The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana, subtitled in later editions “From Burke to Eliot”
- The Russian Thaw’a period of loosening of statist control’occurs in Soviet life and literature
- First medical reports are published reporting a link between smoking and lung cancer
- The Soviets develop and test a hydrogen bomb
- Sir Edmund Hillary climbs Mt. Everest
- Prehistoric cave paintings are discovered in France
- Long considered a genuine find in evolutionary paleontology, Piltdown Man is discovered to be a fake
- Sir Winston Churchill receives the Nobel Prize for Literature
- Mikhail Sholokhov publishes Tikhii Don (Quiet Flows the Don)
- Ian Fleming introduces his fictional secret agent James Bond in Casino Royale
- Brigid Brophy publishes Hackenfeller’s Ape
- Saul Bellow publishes The Adventures of Augie March
- Ira Levin publishes A Kiss before Dying
- Ernest Hemingway receives the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The Old Man and the Sea
- Black Elk’s The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk’s Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux is published
- Theodore Roethke publishes The Waking: Poems 1933-1953
- Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is produced
- Andrea Lee is born
- George Lamming publishes In the Castle of My Skin
- William Inge receives the Pulitzer Prize in drama for Picnic
- James Baldwin publishes Go Tell It on the Mountain
- Ray Bradbury publishes Fahrenheit 451
- Czesław Miłosz publishes La Prise du pouvoir (The Seizure of Power)
- William Inge publishes Picnic
- Charles Olson publishes The Maximus Poems 1-10
- James A. Michener publishes The Bridges at Toko-Ri
- Josef Stalin dies (March 5)
- Samuel Beckett’s En Attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot) is produced (January 5)
- Ivan Bunin dies (November 8)
- Anna Quindlen is born (July 8)
- Dylan Thomas dies (November 9)
- Carl Hiaasen is born (March 12)
- Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings dies (December 14)
- Walter Jon Williams is born (October 15)
- John Patrick’s drama Teahouse of the August Moon is first performed (October 15)
- Hilaire Belloc dies (July 16)
- Robert Schenkkan is born (March 19)
- Eugene O’Neill dies (November 27)
