Chronology 4631938 E.E. Cummings: Collected Poems. Adolf Hitler assumes
command of the German Army.
1939 James Joyce: Finnegan’s Wake. Outbreak of World War II.
John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath. T.S. Eliot: Family
Reunion. Muriel Rukeyser: A Turning Wind.
1940 Paris occupied by the Germans. Richard Wright: Native
Son. Langston Hughes: The Big Sea. Randall Jarrell: The
Rage for the Lost Penny.
1941 Japanese attack Pearl Harbor. Orson Welles: Citizen Kane.
William Carlos Williams: Broken Span. Edward Hopper:
Nighthawks. Marianne Moore: What Are Years?Theodore
Roethke: Open House.
1942 Robert Frost: A Witness Tree. Wallace Stevens: Parts of a
World. Randall Jarrell: Blood for a Stranger. Robert Penn
Warren: Eleven Poems on the Same Theme.
1943 Weldon Kees: The Last Man.
1944 T.S. Eliot: Four Quartets. H.D.: The Walls Do Not Fall.
William Carlos Williams: The Wedge. W.H. Auden: For the
Time Beingand The Sea and the Mirror. Robert Lowell: Land
of Unlikeness. Marianne Moore: Nevertheless.
1945 Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. World War II ends.
Robert Frost: A Masque of Reason. H.D.: Tribute to the
Angels. Gwendolyn Brooks: A Street in Bronzeville.
1946 Robert Penn Warren: All the King’s Men. H.D.: The
Flowering of the Rod. Robert Lowell: Lord Weary’s Castle.
Death of Countee Cullen.
1947 Tennessee Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire. Robert
Frost: Steeple Bush. Wallace Stevens: Transport to Summer.
1948 T.S. Eliot wins the Nobel Prize for Literature. Ezra Pound:
The Pisan Cantos. Theodore Roethke: The Lost Son.
1949 Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman. T.S. Eliot: The Cocktail Party.
1950 The United States attacks Korea. Jackson Pollock: Lavender
Mist. Robert Lowell: The Mills and the Kavanaughs. Deaths
of Edgar Lee Masters and Edna St. Vincent Millay.
1951 Marianne Moore wins the Pulitzer Prize and the National
Book Award for her Collected Poems. Wallace Stevens: The
Necessary Angel. Langston Hughes: Montage of a Dream
Deferred. James Merrill: First Poems.