Calendar of Literary Facts
1908
- E. M. Forster publishes A Room with a View
- Ford Motor Company produces the first Model T, the “Tin Lizzy”
- Congo becomes a colony of Belgium
- General Motors Corporation is founded
- The Union of South Africa is founded
- Mary Baker Eddy begins publishing The Christian Science Monitor, a daily newspaper (not espousing the tenets of Christian Science)
- L. M. Montgomery publishes Anne of Green Gables
- The Austro-Hungarian Empire occupies Bosnia and Herzegovina
- The Young Turks stage a revolt in the Ottoman Empire
- G. K. Chesterton publishes Orthodoxy and The Man Who Was Thursday
- Rudolf Eucken receives the Nobel Prize for Literature
- Anatole France publishes L’ile des pingouins (Penguin Island
- Arnold Bennett publishes The Old Wives’ Tale
- William Hope Hodgson publishes The House on the Borderland
- William Stanley Braithwaite publishes The House of Falling Leaves
- The fountain pen becomes the writing instrument of choice
- Ford Madox Ford founds The English Review and edits this influential periodical for two years
- Richard Wright is born (September 4)
- Harriette Simpson Arnow is born (July 7)
- Simone de Beauvoir is born (January 9)
- John Kenneth Galbraith is born (October 15)
- Ian Fleming is born (May 18)
- Ernest Buckler is born (July 19)
- Jacinto Benavente’s El marido de su viuda: Comedia en un acto (His Widow’s Husband: A Comedy in One Act) is produced (October 19)
- Sinclair Ross is born (January 22)
- Louis L’Amour is born (March 22)
- Arthur Adamov is born (August 23)
- Theodore Roethke is born (May 25)
- Alexander Posey dies (May 27)
- Joseph Mitchell is born (July 27)
- Dee Brown is born (February 28)
- Adam Clayton Powell Jr. is born (November 29)
- Joaquim María Machado de Assis dies (September 29)
- William Saroyan is born (August 31)