1954 in literature

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
List of years in literature (table)
In poetry
1951
1952
1953
1954
1955
1956
1957

This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1954.

Events[]

  • January – Kingsley Amis's first novel, the comic campus novel Lucky Jim, is published by Victor Gollancz Ltd in London.[1]
  • January 7 – The Georgetown–IBM experiment is the first public demonstration of a machine translation system, held in New York at the IBM head office.
  • January 25 – Dylan Thomas's radio play Under Milk Wood is first broadcast in the U.K. on the BBC Third Programme, two months after its author's death, with Richard Burton as "First Voice".
  • February – The London Magazine is revived as a literary magazine, with John Lehmann as editor.
  • March 31 – A. L. Zissu is sentenced in Bucharest to life imprisonment for "conspiring against the social order". This has been a focal point in the anti-Zionist clampdown in Communist Romania.[2]
  • May 29 – The rediscovered and restored early 17th-century Corral de comedias de Almagro in Spain is re-inaugurated with a play by Calderon de la Barca.[3]
  • June 16 – The first public celebration of "Bloomsday" takes place in Dublin: writers Flann O'Brien, Patrick Kavanagh and Anthony Cronin travel in a horse-drawn coach, stopping at numerous bars to retrace the steps of the characters from James Joyce's novel Ulysses.
  • June 22 – In the Parker–Hulme murder case, the 15-year-old Julia Hulme, a future writer of English historical detective fiction as Anne Perry, takes part in the murder of her best friend's mother in Christchurch, New Zealand.
  • July 29 – The first volume of J. R. R. Tolkien's epic The Lord of the Rings – The Fellowship of the Ring – is published in London by George Allen & Unwin. The Two Towers follows on November 11 and publication will be completed in 1955. By 2007, 150 million copies will have been sold worldwide.[4]
  • September 1 – Lawrence Quincy Mumford becomes the U.S.Librarian of Congress.
  • September 17 – William Golding's first novel, the allegorical dystopian Lord of the Flies, is published by Faber and Faber in London.
  • September 22 – Terence Rattigan's two linked plays Separate Tables is first performed, at St James's Theatre, London.
  • October 30 – John Updike's first story for The New Yorker, "Friends from Philadelphia", is published. He graduates from Harvard with a thesis on George Herbert, and begins a year's Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship to the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at England's University of Oxford.
  • November 19 – Brendan Behan's first play, The Quare Fellow is premièred at the Pike Theatre, Dublin.
  • unknown date – Jack Kerouac reads Dwight Goddard's A Buddhist Bible (1932, found in San Jose library), which will influence him greatly.

New books[]

Fiction[]

Children and young people[]

Drama[]

Poetry[]

Non-fiction[]

Births[]

  • January 5 – László Krasznahorkai, Hungarian novelist and screenwriter
  • January 15 – Jose Dalisay, Jr., Filipino writer
  • January 29 – Oprah Winfrey, American actress and talk show host
  • January – Cao Wenxuan (曹文軒), Chinese children's book writer and academic
  • February 2 – Moniza Alvi, Pakistani-British poet and writer
  • March 4 – Irina Ratushinskaya, Russian writer
  • May 6 – Nicholas Crane, English writer, geographer and broadcaster
  • March 16 – S. A. Griffin, American actor and poet
  • March 20 – Louis Sachar, American children's author
  • April 14 – Bruce Sterling, American science-fiction writer
  • May 5 – Hamid Ismailov, Uzbek writer
  • May 23 – Anja Snellman, Finnish writer
  • June 6 – Cynthia Rylant, American children's author and poet
  • June 28 – A. A. Gill, British journalist and critic (died 2016)
  • July 17 – J. Michael Straczynski, American author
  • August 1 – James Gleick, American non-fiction author
  • August 15 – Mary Jo Salter, American poet and academic
  • August 17 – Anatoly Kudryavitsky, Russian-Irish writer
  • September 14 – Mikey Smith, Jamaican dub poet (killed 1983)
  • November 8 – Kazuo Ishiguro, Japanese-born English novelist and Nobel laureate
  • November 10 – Marlene van Niekerk, South African novelist
  • November 11 – Mary Gaitskill, American novelist, essayist and short story writer
  • November 12 �� Christopher Pike (Kevin Christopher McFadden), American children's author
  • December 3 – Grace Andreacchi, American author
  • December 7 – Mark Hofmann, American rare book dealer, forger and murderer
  • December 20 – Sandra Cisneros, American writer
  • unknown dates
    • Esther Delisle, French Canadian author and historian
    • Ibrahim Nasrallah, Jordanian/Palestinian poet and novelist
    • Roma Tearne (Roma Chrysostom), Sri Lankan novelist and artist

Deaths[]

Awards[]

References[]

  1. ^ a b Zachary Leader (2002). On Modern British Fiction. Oxford University Press. p. 62. ISBN 978-0-19-924933-6.
  2. ^ Glass, Hildrun (2010). "Câteva note despre activitatea lui Avram L. Zissu". In Rotman, Liviu; Crăciun, Camelia; Vasiliu, Ana-Gabriela (eds.). Noi perspective în istoriografia evreilor din România. Bucharest: Federation of Jewish Communities of Romania & Editura Hasefer. p. 166.
  3. ^ Boletin de la Real Academia de la Historia (in Spanish), vol. CXCVIII, Madrid, 2001, pp. 352–546, OCLC 1460620.
  4. ^ Wagner, Vit (2007-04-16). "Tolkien proves he's still the king". Toronto Star. Archived from the original on 2011-03-09. Retrieved 2014-06-04.
  5. ^ No. 41 in Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century. Savigneau, Josyane (1999-10-15). "Écrivains et choix sentimentaux". Le Monde. Paris.
  6. ^ Leitch, Vincent B.; Cain, William E.; Finke, Laurie A.; Johnson, Barbara E.; McGowan, John; Williams, Jeffrey J. (2001). "William K. Wimsatt Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley". In Leitch, Vincent B. (ed.). The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. pp. 1371–1374.
  7. ^ Stanley Kunitz (1955). Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Literature. Supplement. H. W. Wilson. p. 353.
  8. ^ Peter Hunt (2 September 2003). International Companion Encyclopedia of Children's Literature. Routledge. p. 367. ISBN 978-1-134-87993-9.
  9. ^ Susan Weiner; Professor Susan Weiner, MS Rdn Cde Cdn (9 May 2001). Enfants Terribles: Youth and Femininity in the Mass Media in France, 1945-1968. JHU Press. p. 215. ISBN 978-0-8018-6539-8.
Retrieved from ""