Calendar of Literary Facts
1988
- Roberto G. Fernandez publishes Raining Backwards
- Andrew Lloyd Webber receives the Antoinette Perry (Tony) Award for best musical for The Phantom of the Opera
- Bharati Mukherjee publishes The Middleman and Other Stories
- Donald Hall publishes The One Day
- William Meredith receives the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Partial Accounts: New and Selected Poems
- Naguib Mahfouz receives the Nobel Prize for Literature
- Anne Tyler publishes Breathing Lessons
- Maxine Hong Kingston publishes Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book
- Kenneth Koch publishes One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays
- Thomas Harris publishes Silence of the Lambs
- Cyrus Colter publishes The Amoralists and Other Tales: Collected Stories
- Peter Carey receives the Booker Prize for Oscar and Lucinda
- Ella Deloria’s novel Waterlily is published posthumously
- Palestinian resistance to Israeli rule, the “Intifada” begins in the West Bank region of Israel
- A terrorist bomb destroys Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland
- An earthquake in Armenia kills 80,000 people
- David Henry Hwang receives an Antoinette Perry Award (Tony) for best play for M.Butterfly
- Amos Oz publishes Black Box
- David Adams Richards receives Governor General’s Award in fiction for Nights Below Station Street
- Yasunari Kawabata’s Palm-of-the-Hand Stories is published
- Lynda Barry publishes The Good Times Are Killing Me
- Isabel Allende publishes Eva Luna
- Robert Harling publishes Steel Magnolias
- Kobo Abe publishes The Ark Sakura
- Salman Rushdie publishes The Satanic Verses
- Nicholson Baker publishes The Mezzanine
- George Barker receives the Commonwealth Prize
- Barbara Kingsolver publishes The Bean Trees
- Barbara Taylor Bradford publishes To Be the Best
- Rosamunde Pilcher publishes The Shell Seekers
- Wendy Wasserstein publishes The Heidi Chronicles
- Edmund White publishes The Beautiful Room is Empty
- Alfred Uhry publishes Driving Miss Daisy
- Toni Morrison receives the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for Beloved
- Alfred Uhry receives the Pulitzer Prize in drama for Driving Miss Daisy
- Tomson Highway publishes The Rez Sisters
- Robert Duncan dies (February 3)
- Michael Shaara dies (May 5)
- Robert A. Heinlein dies (May 8)
- Louis L’Amour dies (June 10)
- Alan Paton dies (April 12)
- René Char dies (February 19)
- Raymond Carver dies (May 25)
- Charles Willeford dies (March 27)