Youthful Fire16Arthur Rimbaud writes “Le Bateau ivre” (The Drunken Boat).18Rimbaud writes “Une Saison en Enfer” (A Season in Hell).19Dylan Thomas writes (or publishes) his first major poems, including “And Death Shall Have No Dominion,” “Before I Knocked,” and “The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower.”20John Keats writes “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.”

Mary Shelley publishes Frankenstein.

Rimbaud retires from writing.23Keats writes his sequence of Great Odes.

Carson McCullers publishes The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.24Alfred, Lord Tennyson writes “Ulysses.”

Langston Hughes publishes The Weary Blues.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe publishes The Sorrows of Young Werther.25Ernest Hemingway publishes In Our Time.

W. B. Yeats publishes “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.”

Keats dies.26T. S. Eliot publishes Prufrock and Other Observations, which includes “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge joint-publishes Lyrical Ballads with William Wordsworth (who was 28).

Percy Bysshe Shelley writes “Ozymandias.”

Dylan Thomas begins to slow down, having produced over eighty percent of his body of published work.

Hart Crane completes his debut poetry collection, White Buildings.27John Steinbeck publishes his first novel, Cup of Gold

Hemingway publishes The Sun Also Rises.28John Milton writes “Lycidas.”
William Wordsworth joint-publishes Lyrical Ballads with S. T. Coleridge (who was 26).

Flannery O’Connor publishes “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.”

Albert Camus publishes L’Etranger (The Stranger).

F. Scott Fitzgerald publishes The Great Gatsby.29Emily Brontë publishes Wuthering Heights.

James Baldwin publishes Go Tell It on the Mountain.

Allen Ginsberg debuts “Howl.”

Sylvia Plath writes most of her Ariel poems, many in the few weeks preceding her 30th birthday.

Percy Bysshe Shelley dies, possibly by suicide.30William Shakespeare completes Romeo and Juliet.

Hart Crane publishes The Bridge.

Plath composes her final Ariel poems and dies by suicide.35John Steinbeck publishes Of Mice and MenMiddle-Aged Inspiration37John Steinbeck publishes The Grapes of Wrath39George Eliot publishes her first novel, Adam Bede.

Ralph Ellison publishes his first novel, Invisible Man.

Robert Frost publishes his first poetry collection, A Boy’s Will.42Vladimir Nabokov publishes The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, his first novel written in English.

Marcel Proust publishes the first volume of In Search of Lost Time.44Wallace Stevens publishes his first poetry collection, Harmonium.56Sophocles writes Antigone, arguably his first major play.57Miguel de Cervantes publishes the first volume of Don Quixote.58John Milton publishes Paradise Lost.Late Mastery59John Steinbeck publishes The Winter of Our Discontent65Laura Ingalls Wilder publishes the first book in her Little House series.66Elizabeth Bishop publishes Geography III.67Miguel de Cervantes publishes the second volume of Don Quixote.68Sophocles debuts Oedipus Rex.73W. B. Yeats completes his final poems, including “Lapis Lazuli” and “Under Ben Bulben.”75Leo Tolstoy completes his final novel, Hadji Murat.
Wallace Stevens completes his final poems, including “Of Mere Being,” written a few days before his last hospitalization.76Anna Akhmatova works on her magnum opus Poem Without a Hero, begun 20 years earlier, until her death.82Goethe finishes writing Faust Part Two (Part One having been published when he was 59).83Jorge Luis Borges publishes his last short story, “Shakespeare’s Memory.”