J.R.R. Tolkien

1892 – 1973

Literature

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was an English writer and philologist. He was the author of the high fantasy works The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954–55).

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Contemporaries

Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia O'Keeffe

Charlie Chaplin

Charlie Chaplin

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Igor Stravinsky

Igor Stravinsky

Charles de Gaulle

Charles de Gaulle

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Their World

Global Events

1893 New Zealand becomes first country to grant women's suffrage

1896 First modern Olympic Games in Athens

1898 Spanish-American War

1903 Wright brothers achieve powered flight

1905 Einstein publishes theory of special relativity

1912 Sinking of the Titanic

1914 World War I begins

1917 Russian Revolution

1918 World War I ends; Spanish flu pandemic begins

1919 Treaty of Versailles signed

1920 League of Nations established

1928 Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin

1929 Wall Street Crash; Great Depression begins

1933 Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany

1936 Spanish Civil War begins

1939 World War II begins

1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor; US enters WWII

1944 D-Day: Allied invasion of Normandy

1945 Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; WWII ends

1945 United Nations founded

1947 India and Pakistan gain independence

1948 State of Israel established

1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted

1949 People's Republic of China proclaimed

1950 Korean War begins

1953 Watson and Crick discover DNA structure

1955 Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott

1957 Sputnik launched; Space Age begins

1959 Cuban Revolution; Castro takes power

1961 Berlin Wall constructed

1962 Cuban Missile Crisis

1963 Assassination of President John F. Kennedy

1964 Civil Rights Act signed in the United States

1969 Apollo 11: first humans walk on the Moon

1971 Bangladesh Liberation War and independence

1973 1973 oil crisis

In Their Field

1899 Joseph Conrad publishes Heart of Darkness

1922 James Joyce publishes Ulysses

1925 F. Scott Fitzgerald publishes The Great Gatsby

1929 Virginia Woolf publishes A Room of One's Own

1949 George Orwell publishes Nineteen Eighty-Four

1955 Gabriel Garcia Marquez begins literary career

1960 Harper Lee publishes To Kill a Mockingbird

1967 Garcia Marquez publishes One Hundred Years of Solitude