Calendar of Literary Facts
1936
- Eyvind Johnson publishes Volume III of his tetralogy Romanem om Olaf, entitled Se dig inte om!
- English publisher Allen Lane founds Penguin Books, instigating the “paperback revolution” in England
- Ralph J. Bunche publishes A World View of Race
- Karel Čapek publishes Valka s mloky (The War with the Newts)
- Robert E. Sherwood’s drama Idiot’s Delight is first performed
- Walter de la Mare publishes Ghost Stories
- D’Arcy McNickle publishes The Surrounded
- Eugene O’Neill receives the Nobel Prize for Literature
- Ramón Sender publishes Mister Witt en el canton (Mr. Witt among the Rebels)
- Luis Cernuda publishes La realidad y el deseo
- Hitler and Mussolini agree to form the Rome-Berlin Axis
- German forces occupy the Rhineland
- The Spanish Civil War is fought; Nationalist forces aided by Germany and Italy defeat Loyalist forces aided by the Soviet Union
- C. S. Lewis publishes The Allegory of Love
- Harold Lenoir Davis receives the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for Honey in the Horn
- Robert P. Tristram Coffin receives the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Strange Holiness
- Arna Bontemps publishes Black Thunder
- Henry Miller publishes Black Spring
- Dylan Thomas publishes Twenty-five Poems
- The first successful helicopter flight is conducted in a craft designed by Heinrich Focke
- Jacques Maritain publishes Humanisme integral: problemes temporels et spirituels d’une nouvelle chretienne (Integral Humanism: Temporal and Spiritual Problems of a New Christendom)
- Jean M. Auel is born
- John Dos Passos publishes The Big Money, the concluding volume in his “U.S.A.” trilogy
- Eric Ambler publishes The Dark Frontier
- Larry McMurtry is born (June 3)
- Alfred Uhry is born (December 3)
- C. K. Williams is born (November 4)
- Ramón del Valle-Inclán dies (January 5)
- Vaclav Havel is born (October 5)
- Lewis Nkosi is born (December 5)
- Mourning Dove dies (August 8)
- Anne Rivers Siddons is born (January 9)
- June Jordan is born (July 9)
- American athlete Jesse Owens, a black man, wins four gold medals at the summer Olympic games in Berlin—a bitter pill for Adolf Hitler, who had earlier boasted of the inherent superiority of the “Aryan race” (August 9)
- Luigi Pirandello dies (December 10)
- Andre Dubus is born (August 11)
- Virginia Hamilton is born (March 12)
- G. K. Chesterton dies (June 14)
- Frank Conroy is born (January 15)
- Paul Zindel is born (May 15)
- Edna O’Brien is born (December 15)
- Grazia Deledda dies (August 16)
- David Caute is born (December 16)
- Estela Portillo Trambley is born (January 16)
- Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin is born (August 17)
- Rudyard Kipling dies (January 18)
- Sharon Pollock is born (April 19)
- Federico García Lorca dies (August 19)
- Alistair MacLeod is born (July 20)
- Don Delillo is born (November 20)
- M. Scott Peck is born (May 22)
- Richard Bach is born (June 23)
- A. S. Byatt is born (August 24)
- Manlio Argueta is born (November 24)
- Bernard DeVoto publishes a scathing review of Thomas Wolfe’s The Story of a Novel which outrages the sensitive Wolfe and leads to his leaving his longtime editor, Maxwell Perkins (April 25)
- Lucille Clifton is born (June 27)
- Mario Vargas llosa is born (March 28)
- Judith Guest is born (March 29)
- Margaret Mitchell publishes Gone With the Wind (June 30)
- A. E. Housman dies (April 30)
- Clarence Major is born (December 31)
- Miguel de Unamuno dies (December 31)
