Calendar of Literary Facts
1955
- Alistair MacLean publishes H.M.S. Ulysses
- Thomas McGrath publishes Figures from a Double World
- Anne Morrow Lindbergh publishes Gift from the Sea
- Juan Rulfo publishes Pedro Páramo (Pedro Páramo: A Novel of Mexico)
- Wallace Stevens receives the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
- R. S. Thomas publishes Song at the Year’s Turning: Poems, 1942-1954
- Stephen Spender publishes Collected Poems, 1928-1953
- Elizabeth Bishop publishes A Cold Spring
- Vladimir Nabokov publishes Lolita
- Satyajit Ray completes his screenplay Pather panchali
- W. H. Auden publishes The Shield of Achilles
- William Faulkner receives the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for A Fable
- Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is produced
- Patricia Highsmith publishes The Talented Mr. Ripley
- Patrick White publishes The Tree of Man
- Inspired by the example of Rosa Parks, African Americans in Montgomery, Alabama boycott segregated bus service in that city
- Gregory Corso publishes The Vestal Lady on Brattle, and Other Poems
- Halldór Laxness receives the Nobel Prize for Literature
- J. R. R. Tolkien publishes The Return of the King, volume 3 in the Lord of the Rings trilogy
- MacKinlay Kantor publishes Andersonville
- Argentinian dictator Juan Perón resigns in the face of a popular uprising
- William Gaddis publishes The Recognitions
- William F. Buckley Jr. founds National Review
- William Hoffman publishes The Trumpet Unblown
- Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich produce the drama The Diary of Anne Frank
- Iain Crichton Smith publishes The Long River
- Dorothy L. Sayers publishes Purgatory, the second volume in her translation of Dante’s Divina Commedia
- Wallace Stevens dies (August 2)
- Robert E. Sherwood dies (November 4)
- John Grisham is born (February 8)
- Barbara Kingsolver is born (April 8)
- Thomas Mann dies (August 12)
- Jay McInerney is born (January 13)
- James Agee dies (May 16)
- José Ortega y Gasset dies (October 18)
- Neil Bissoondath is born (April 19)
- Walter White dies (March 21)
- Robert P. Tristram Coffin dies (October 29)
