| Date |
Berry |
Meanwhile ... |
| 1934 |
Aug. 5: Wendell Erdman Berry born in
Henry County, Kentucky to John Marshall and Virginia Erdman Berry; John Marshall Berry a lawyer and official with Burley Tobacco Growers Association
|
Hitler and Mussolini meet in Venice; Gandhi suspends civil disobedience campaign in India; Sophia Loren born; FBI guns down John Dillinger outside theater in Chicago; F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night; Academy Award goes to Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night; Wallace Stegner marries Mary Stuart Page |
| 1936 |
Berry family moves to
New Castle, Kentucky
|
Hitler wins 99% of vote in German elections; Axis alliance between Hitler and Mussolini announced; FDR reelected by landslide; F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up; Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind; Rudyard Kipling dies; Hoover Dam completed; Ford Foundation established; Life magazine begins publishing |
| 1945 |
|
After 12 years of teaching, including six at Harvard,
Wallace Stegner joins faculty of Stanford University as professor of English and director of creative writing program |
| 1948 |
After 8th grade in New Castle School, Wendell sent to Millersburg Military Institute
|
Gandhi assassinated; Congress enacts Marshall Plan; birth of Israel; Truman elected president; Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead; Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country; Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain; Babe Ruth dies; Eddie Arcaro rides Citation to Triple Crown victory |
| 1952 |
Graduated from MMI, enters University of Kentucky
|
Britain develops atomic bomb; Eisenhower elected president; Albert Schweitzer wins Nobel Peace Prize; Eva Peron dies; Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea; John Steinbeck’s East of Eden; Hank Williams’ “Your Cheatin’ Heart” |
| 1953-54 |
While sophomore at UK, shares creative writing class with freshman James Baker Hall; the two become friends
|
Vietnamese Communists occupy Hanoi, take Dien Bien Phu; USSR explodes hydrogen bomb; Sen. Joseph McCarthy continues hearings, goes on television, is censured; cigarette smoking reported responsible for lung cancer; Academy Awards go to From Here to Eternity and On the Waterfront; Arthur Miller’s The Crucible; Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception; Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale; Tennessee Williams’ Camino Real and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies; J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings |
| 1955 |
Meets Tanya Amyx, daughter of UK art professor
|
Charlie “Bird” Parker dies; Albert Einstein dies; Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita |
| 1956 |
Receives A.B. from UK; attends summer seminars at Indiana University with Jim Hall; enters graduate study at UK in fall—along with former Stanford University student Ed McClanahan
|
Soviet troops march into Hungary; Prince Ranier of Monaco marries Grace Kelly; revolutionary Fidel Castro lands in Cuba; Eisenhower/Nixon elected; transatlantic telephone service begins; Max Beerbohm dies; H.L. Mencken dies; Thomas J. Watson, founder of IBM, dies; Grace Metalious’ Peyton Place; Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady; Elvis Presley’s “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Hound Dog,” Don’t Be Cruel” |
| 1957 |
In May, receives M.A. from UK and marries Tanya Amyx; in fall, begins teaching at Georgetown (KY) College; visits regularly with Ed and Kitty McClanahan (Ed still in graduate school); Jim Hall goes to Stanford University as graduate student
|
USSR launches Sputnik I and II; John Glenn sets jet speed record in flight from California to New York; 13-year-old Bobby Fischer wins acclaim as chess player; Teamsters Union expelled from AFL-CIO; desegregation confrontation in Little Rock, AR; Jack Kerouac’s On the Road; Gore Vidal’s A Visit to a Small Planet; Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat; Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged; Academy Award to The Bridge on the River Kwai; Humphrey Bogart dies |
| 1958 |
Daughter Mary Berry born in May; in the fall, Wendell enters Stanford University as Wallace Stegner Fellow, where he will share seminar with Ken Kesey; Ed McClanahan begins teaching in Corvallis, OR
|
De Gaulle elected president of France; Alaska enters union as 49th state; National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) founded; Arnold Palmer wins first Masters Tournament; Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s; Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago; Leon Uris’ Exodus; James Branch Cabell dies; George Jean Nathan dies; Robert Penn Warren wins Pulitzer Prize for Promises: Poems 1954-56; “The Chipmunk Song,” “The Purple People Eater” are popular songs |
| 1960 |
Nathan Coulter, novel
|
U-2 piloted by Francis Gary Powers shot down over USSR; Adolf Eichmann arrested; Kennedy elected president; W.E.B. DuBois dies; Albert Camus dies; Harper Lee wins Pulitzer Prize for To Kill a Mockingbird; John Updike’s Rabbit, Run; Gore Vidal’s The Best Man; “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” is popular song |
| 1961-62 |
In Europe (mostly Florence, Italy) on Guggenheim Fellowship
|
Bay of Pigs invasion; Berlin Wall goes up; James Meredith begins classes at University of Mississippi under protection of U.S. marshals and soldiers; West Side Story, Lawrence of Arabia win Academy Awards; J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey; Joseph Heller’s Catch-22; Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land; Ty Cobb dies; Ernest Hemingway commits suicide; Dashiell Hammett dies; e.e. cummings dies; William Faulkner dies; Hermann Hesse dies; Marilyn Monroe dies; “Moon River,” “Where the Boys Are,” “Blowin’ in the Wind” are popular songs |
| 1962-64 |
Teaches freshman English at New York University’s University College in Bronx; in fall 1964, begins teaching creative writing at the University of Kentucky
|
Cuban missile crisis; Martin Luther King Jr., arrested in Birmingham, AL; President Kennedy assassinated in Dallas; fighting escalates in Vietnam; first use of artificial heart in surgery; Cassius Clay (later Muhammad Ali) wins heavyweight boxing title from Sonny Liston; Douglas MacArthur dies; Robert Frost dies; Aldous Huxley dies; Gore Vidal’s Julian; Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; movies Dr. Strangelove, A Hard Day’s Night, Goldfinger; popular songs “Danke Schoen,” “I Want To Hold Your Hand” |
| 1965 |
Moves to Lanes Landing Farm, Port Royal, Kentucky
|
Race riots in Watts (Los Angeles) kill 35; Malcolm X assassinated in New York; Edward R. Murrow dies; W. Somerset Maugham dies; Albert Schweitzer dies; Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed; movie Dr. Zhivago; popular songs “King of the Road,” “Downtown” |
| 1967 |
A Place on Earth
|
U.S. bombs Hanoi; Six-Day War between Israel and Arab nations; China explodes first hydrogen bomb; J. Robert Oppenheimer dies; Carl Sandburg dies; Spencer Tracy dies; Woody Guthrie dies; Desmond Morris’ The Naked Ape; Gore Vidal’s Washington D.C.; William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner; movies Bonnie and Clyde, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner |
| 1974 |
The Memory of Old Jack
|
U.S. President Richard Nixon resigns; Israeli leader Golda Meir resigns; West German Chancellor Willy Brandt resigns; British Prime Minister Edward Heath resigns; India explodes nuclear device; gasoline shortages in U.S.; Soviet Union lands probe on Mars; Patty Hearst, kidnaped heiress, joins Symbionese Liberation Army; Charles Lindbergh dies; Walter Lippmann dies; Jack Benny dies; Duke Ellington dies; Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago; Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow; movies Chinatown, The Godfather Part II |
| 1977 |
Resigns from University of Kentucky; The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture
|
President Jimmy Carter pardons Vietnam-era draft evaders, tells Americans the energy crisis shows the need for “the moral equivalent of war” against wasteful consumption; Concorde begins flying between New York and Europe; space shuttle Enterprise makes first manned flight; SAT scores show steady decline between 1963 and 1977; Bing Crosby dies; Maria Callas dies; Elvis Presley dies; Groucho Marx dies; Wallace Stegner’s The Spectator Bird wins National Book Award; movies Star Wars, Annie Hall, Saturday Night Fever |
| 1981 |
The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural
|
Ronald Reagan inaugurated; Iran releases 52 American hostages; Prince Charles and Lady Diana are married; John Hinkley shoots Ronald Reagan; Sandra Day O’Connor becomes first female U.S. Supreme Court justice; Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) identified; IBM begins selling its version of the “personal computer” or PC; Walter Cronkite retires; Muhammad Ali retires from boxing; Natalie Wood dies; Hoagy Carmichael dies; Bill Haley dies; Bob Marley dies; movies On Golden Pond, Raiders of the Lost Ark |
| 1983 |
Standing by Words
|
Shiite Muslim bombs in Beirut, Lebanon kill hundreds of American soldiers; U.S. invades Grenada; Reagan administration openly supports Nicaraguan Contra rebels; Marsha Norman’s ’Night, Mother wins Pulitzer Prize; Tennessee Williams dies; Buckminster Fuller dies; television’s The Day After and the last episode of M*A*S*H*; Slim Pickens dies; Gloria Swanson dies; movies The Big Chill, Educating Rita, Flashdance; Karen Carpenter dies; Ira Gershwin dies; Muddy Waters dies; popular songs “Thriller,” “Flashdance”; Sally Ride becomes first American female astronaut; compact disc makes marketplace debut; Pioneer 10 leaves the solar system; Meyer Lansky dies |
| 1986 |
The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership
|
Marcos driven out of Philippines; Duvalier flees Haiti; Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Reykjavik, Iceland; President Reagan admits secret arms deals with Iran; Bernard Malamud dies; Robert Penn Warren appointed first Poet Laureate of the United States; Carlos Fuentes’ The Old Gringo; L. Ron Hubbard dies; James Cagney dies; Cary Grant dies; Georgia O’Keeffe dies; Otto Preminger dies; Donna Reed dies; movies Blue Velvet, Crocodile Dundee, Howard the Duck; Benny Goodman dies; Challenger explodes during launch; 25,000 AIDS cases diagnosed in U.S.; Marlin Perkins dies; Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster |
| 1987 |
Returns to University of Kentucky, teaching literature and education; Home Economics
|
Rudoph Hess commits suicide in Spandau Prison; James Baldwin dies; Erskine Caldwell dies; Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities; Fred Astaire dies; Jackie Gleason dies; Andy Warhol dies; movies Fatal Attraction, Wall Street; songs “Bad,” “Graceland”; Bob Fosse dies; Liberace dies; the last wild California condor is trapped and sent for breeding in a local zoo; Microsoft stock share prices make Bill Gates, 32, a billionaire |
| 1988 |
Remembering
|
Solidarity strikes in Poland; Soviet troops begin leaving Afghanistan; Mikhail Gorbachev becomes president of Soviet Union; George Bush elected president of U.S.; Robert Heinlein dies; Louis L’Amour dies; Alan Paton dies; Toni Morrison’s Beloved wins Pulitzer Prize; Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses; movies Die Hard, Who Framed Roger Rabbit; Philip Glass opera The Fall of the House of Usher premieres in Louisville; Roy Orbison dies; songs “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” “Fast Car”; Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time; first transatlantic optical fiber cable; carbon dating places Shroud of Turin origin about 1330 C.E.; Internet computer virus infects 6,000 military computers; Richard Feynman dies; U.S. airlines ban smoking on short flights; McDonald’s opens restaurants in Moscow; Pan Am 747 blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland |
| 1990 |
What Are People For?
|
Washington, DC Mayor Marion Berry arrested for drug possession; Nelson Mandela freed from South African prison; Iraq invades Kuwait; East and West Germany formally reunified; Akihito proclaimed 125th emperor of Japan; Lech Walesa elected president of Poland; Malcolm Muggeridge dies; R.D. Laing dies; B.F. Skinner dies; Mapplethorpe photos exhibited in Cincinnati; Greta Garbo dies; Jim Henson dies; movies Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Dick Tracy; Leonard Bernstein dies; Aaron Copland dies; Sammy Davis Jr. dies; Sarah Vaughan dies; “dolphin-safe” tuna fishing practices announced by American companies; Malcolm Forbes dies |
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U N F I N I S H E D |
