May 1

In literary history

• 1950Gwendolyn Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Annie Allen, becoming the first Black American to receive the award. She learned the news by telephone at home, the electricity having been cut off for an unpaid bill.

Writers born on May 1

• Joseph Heller (1923)

The Daily Canon for May 1

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels (1848).