Calendar of Literary Facts
1931
- The U.S. Supreme Court decides the case of Near v. Minnesota, determining that prior restraint in publishing is unconstitutional except in rare and extreme circumstances
- Morley Callaghan publishes No Man’s Meat
- Ogden Nash publishes Hard Lines
- Roberto Arlt publishes Los lanzallamas
- Okot p’Bitek is born
- Pearl S. Buck publishes The Good Earth
- Georges Simenon publishes Pietr-le-Letton (The Strange Case of Peter the Lett)
- Edmund Wilson publishes Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930
- Henry Steele Commager and Samuel Eliot Morison publish The Growth of the American Republic
- Margaret Ayer Barnes receives the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for Years of Grace
- Caroline Gordon publishes Penhally
- The “Scottsboro Boys,” nine young black men accused of raping two white women, are tried and convicted in Scottsboro, Alabama; this case gains widespread publicity and discussion
- Spain declares itself a republic
- George Dillon publishes The Flowering Stone
- Frans Eemil Sillanpää publishes Nuorena nukkunut (The Maid Silja)
- Erik Axel Karlfeldt receives the Nobel Prize for Literature
- Japanese forces invade and conquer Manchuria
- Rolf Hochhuth is born (April 1)
- Judith Viorst is born (February 2)
- Tom Wolfe is born (March 2)
- Juan Goytisolo is born (January 5)
- Vachel Lindsay dies (December 5)
- E. L. Doctorow is born (January 6)
- Donald Barthelme is born (April 7)
- Desmond Tutu is born (October 7)
- Gene Wolfe is born (May 7)
- David Eddings is born (July 7)
- Kahlil Gibran dies (April 10)
- Alice Munro is born (July 10)
- Adrienne Kennedy is born (September 13)
- Ivan Klima is born (September 14)
- Tomas Transtroemer is born (April 15)
- Clive Cussler is born (July 15)
- George Starbuck is born (June 15)
- Caroline Blackwood is born (July 16)
- Toni Morrison is born (February 18)
- David Cornwell (John Le Carré) is born (October 19)
- Etheridge Knight is born (April 19)
- Fay Weldon is born (September 22)
- Floyd Salas is born (January 24)
- Lonne Elder III is born (December 26)
- Abelardo B. Delgado is born (November 27)
- Mordecai Richler is born (January 27)
- Arnold Bennett dies (March 27)
