Calendar of Literary Facts
1980
- William Golding receives the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage
- Wendy Rose publishes Lost Copper
- Robert R. McCammon publishes The Night Boat
- Jayanta Mahapatra publishes Relationship
- Czesław Miłosz receives the Nobel Prize for Literature
- Katherine Anne Porter dies
- Paul Muldoon publishes Why Brownlee Left
- Ronald Harwood’s drama The Dresser is first produced
- W. P. Kinsella publishes Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa
- Milan Kundera publishes The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
- Anita Desai publishes Clear Light of Day
- Augusto Roa Bastos publishes Still Life with Woodpecker
- W. D. Valgardson publishes Gentle Sinners
- Kevin Major publishes Far from Shore
- Simon J. Ortiz publishes Fightback: For the Sake of the People, for the Sake of the Land
- Anne Tyler publishes Morgan’s Passing
- John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces is published
- The video rental business begins
- The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty is published
- “The Poems of Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford” is published in Studies in Philology
- Iraq and Iran wage war against each other
- Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) gains its independence
- The Solidarity trade union is formed in Poland during a shipyard strike in Gdansk
- Mount St. Helens (in Washington) erupts, darkening the skies with ash and destroying the surrounding area for many miles
- An attempt by the American military to rescue American embassy staff held hostage in Iran fails
- Al Young publishes Ask Me Now
- Gene Wolfe publishes The Shadow of the Torturer
- Hanay Geiogamah publishes New Native American Drama: Three Plays
- Umberto Eco publishes Il Nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose)
- Ray A. Young Bear publishes Winter of the Salamander: The Keeper of Importance
- The Antoinette Perry Award (Tony) Award for Best Play is awarded to Amadeus by Peter Shaffer
- James Schuyler publishes The Morning of the Poem
- Danielle Steel publishes Loving
- Luis Omar Salinas publishes Afternoon of the Unreal
- Ann Rule publishes The Stranger Beside Me
- Jeffrey Archer publishes Kane & Abel
- Peter Straub publishes Shadowland
- Ernesto Cardenal publishes Zero Hour and Other Documentary Poems
- Judy Blume publishes Superfudge
- Jean M. Auel publishes The Clan of the Cave Bear
- Toni Cade Bambara publishes The Salt Eaters
- Pat Booth publishes The Lady and the Champ
- Ntozake Shange publishes Mother Courage and Her Children
- Margaret Truman publishes Murder in the White House
- Lanford Wilson receives the Pulitzer Prize in drama for Talley’s Folly
- J. M. Coetzee publishes Waiting for the Barbarians
- Henry Miller dies
- Eric Van Lustbader publishes The Ninja
- Dean Koontz publishes Whispers
- Pat Conroy publishes The Lords of Discipline
- Ethel Davis Wilson dies
- Margaret Crane dies
- C. P. Snow dies (July 1)
- Camara Laye dies (February 4)
- David Mercer dies (August 8)
- Muriel Rukeyser dies (February 12)
- Jean-Paul Sartre dies (April 15)
- Alejo Carpentier dies (April 24)
- James Wright dies (March 25)
- Robert E. Hayden dies (February 25)
- Roland Barthes dies (March 25)
- Marshall McLuhan dies (December 31)