Calendar of Literary Facts
1948
- James Gould Cozzens publishes Guard of Honor
- Harold Robbins publishes Never Love a Stranger
- Richard M. Weaver publishes Ideas Have Consequences
- Approximately 135 million paperback books are sold in the U.S.
- W. H. Auden receives Pulitzer Prize in poetry for The Age of Anxiety
- Jeanette Armstrong is born
- Norman Mailer publishes The Naked and the Dead
- Henry Kreisel publishes The Rich Man
- Sidney Sheldon publishes Easter Parade
- Robert E. Sherwood receives the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction for Roosevelt and Hopkins
- Alan Paton publishes Cry, the Beloved Country
- The Universal Declaration of Human Rights if framed by the United Nations, holding that all people are entitled to the right of free expression
- B. F. Skinner publishes Walden Two
- Truman Capote publishes Other Voices, Other Rooms
- Ezra Pound publishes The Pisan Cantos
- Sir Winston Churchill publishesThe Second World War, in six volumes
- Eugenio Montale publishes Volume I of his Poesie, entitled Ossi di seppia
- T. S. Eliot receives the Nobel Prize for Literature
- Ernesto Sábato publishes El túnel (The Tunnel)
- Thomas Merton publishes The Seven Storey Mountain
- Thor Heyerdahl publishes Kon-Tiki Ekspedisjonen (Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft)
- René Char publishes Fureur et mystère
- Ronald Frederick Delderfield publishes Worm’s Eye View
- A. M. Klein publishes The Rocking Chair, and Other Poems
- James A. Michener receives the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for Tales of the South Pacific
- T. Coraghessan Boyle is born (December 2)
- Antonin Artaud dies (March 4)
- Leslie Marmon Silko is born (March 5)
- Wendy Rose is born (May 7)
- Thomas Mofolo dies (September 8)
- Dan Simmons is born (July 12)
- Gertrude Atherton dies (June 14)
- Denise Chávez is born (August 15)
- Felix Paul Greve (Frederick Philip Grove) dies (August 18)
- Kathy Acker is born (April 18)
- Ntozake Shange is born (October 18)
- Ian McEwan is born (June 21)
- Andrew Lloyd Webber is born (March 22)
- Claude McKay dies (May 22)
- Charles Johnson is born (April 23)
- David Edgar is born (February 26)
- Vonda McIntyre is born (August 28)
- Mohandas K. Gandhi is assassinated (January 30)
