Calendar of Literary Facts
1915
- 1.5 million Armenians die in a genocidal massacre conducted by the “Young Turk” government of the Ottoman Empire
- Rupert Brooke’s 1914, and Other Poems is published
- Franz Kafka publishes Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis)
- Ford Madox Ford publishes The Good Soldier
- Albert Einstein formulates his general theory of relativity
- Edgar Lee Masters publishes Spoon River Anthology
- D. W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation debuts
- T. S. Eliot publishes “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in the magazine Poetry
- Inspired by a viewing of the film The Birth of a Nation Col. William J. Simmons founds the modern-day Ku Klux Klan at Stone Mountain, Georgia
- James Branch Cabell publishes The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck
- Vladimir Mayakovsky publishes Oblako v shtanaakh (A Cloud in Trousers)
- John Buchan publishes The Thirty-Nine Steps
- Romain Rolland receives the Nobel Prize for Literature
- W. Somerset Maugham publishes Of Human Bondage
- Jean Stafford is born (July 1)
- Margaret Walker is born (July 7)
- Saul Bellow is born (June 10)
- Roland Barthes is born (November 12)
- Kenneth Millar is born (December 13)
- Booker T. Washington dies (November 14)
- Arthur Miller is born (October 17)
- Richard Condon is born (March 18)
- The fictional twosome of Bertie Wooster and Jeeves is introduced by P. G. Wodehouse in the story “Extricating Young Gussie,” published in The Saturday Evening Post (September 18)
- The ship Endurance, commanded by Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton, becomes entrapped in ice south of Elephant Island, near Antarctica (January 18)
- Rupert Brooke dies (April 23)
- Herman Wouk is born (May 27)
- Yves Theriault is born (November 28)
- Ketti Frings is born (February 28)
- Thomas Merton is born (January 31)
