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On Thursday, May 4, 1950, Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles is published. The twenty-six stories in the collection weave a narrative of nostalgia and doom that spreads across the rust-red Martian landscape, where cringing anxiety mixes with slack-jawed wonder.
Monday, April 6, 1953, J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories is published by Crown. The collection, with its wry and spiritually wounded characters, immediately garners Salinger praise and solidifies his reputation (after 1951’s The Catcher in the Rye) as an important voice in American fiction.
On the morning of May 18, 1980, nine years after The Lathe of Heaven first appeared, Mt. St. Helens erupts just seventy miles north of Portland, sending a roiling shaft of smoke nine miles into the atmosphere.
Valentine’s Day, 1930. Dashiell Hammett’s genre-establishing detective novel The Maltese Falcon, set in San Francisco where the author lives, is published.
In January 1959 Chinua Achebe’s debut novel, Things Fall Apart, is first published in the US. The novel follows Okonkwo, a leader in the Igbo tribe, as he negotiates personal tragedy amid the arrival of British Colonial forces into Africa in the late nineteenth century.
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