istoryworld
Events relating to literature
Christopher Fry's verse drama The Lady's Not For Burning engages in high-spirited poetic word play
Annie Allen, by US author Gwendolyn Brooks, describes in narrative verse the life of a black girl in contemporary USA
Death of a Salesman, by US playwright Arthur Miller, has its first performance in New York
Enid Blyton introduces her most successful character, Noddy, a small boy who can't avoid nodding when he speaks
George Orwell publishes Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel set in a terrifying totalitarian state of the future, watched over by Big Brother
French dramatist Eugène Ionesco's play The Bald Prima Donna launches the Theatre of the Absurd
The Family Moskat, about a Jewish family in Warsaw, is the first of Isaac Bashevis Singer's books to be published in English
C.S. Lewis gives the first glimpse of Narnia in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
British author Doris Lessing publishes her first novel, The Grass is Singing
US sociologist David Riesman analyzes the American character in The Lonely Crowd
The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda publishes his epic account of South America and its people, Canto general
German-born US philosopher Hannah Arendt links Hitler's and Stalin's regimes in The Origins of Totalitarianism
Catcher in the Rye is US author J.D. Salinger's immensely successful first novel
British author John Wyndham creates a dark fantasy in his novel The Day of the Triffids
A Question of Upbringing begins Antony Powell's 'A Dance to the Music of Time'
US novelist Carson McCullers publishes a collection of stories, The Ballad of the Sad Café
British art historian Nikolaus Pevsner undertakes a massive task, a county-by-county description of The Buildings of England
US author Ralph Ellison publishes his first novel, Invisible Man, a Kafkaesque account of a black immigrant's life in New York
Ernest Hemingway publishes The Old Man and the Sea, about an epic struggle between an aged Cuban fisherman and a gigantic marlin
Evelyn Waugh publishes Men at Arms, the first novel in the Sword of Honour trilogy based on his wartime experiences
In his novel East of Eden John Steinbeck develops the biblical theme of Cain and Abel in a family saga set in California
US clergyman Norman Vincent Peale has a best-seller in The Power of Positive Thinking
Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot ('En attendant Godot') is first performed in French in Paris
Saul Bellow publishes The Adventures of Augie March, a novel about the experiences of a young Chicago Jew
English author L.P. Hartley sets his novel The Go-Between in the summer of 1900
