Calendar of Literary Facts
1962
- Archeologists Helge Ingestad and Anne Stine Ingestad uncover the remains of a Viking settlement in L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, Canada
- Second Vatican Council begins in Rome
- American astronaut John Glenn orbits the earth
- The Cuban Missile Crisis brings the world to the brink of nuclear war, which is averted by the diplomacy of President John Kennedy and Secretary-General Nikita Khrushchev
- Diane Wakoski publishes Coins and Coffins
- Anthony Burgess publishes A Clockwork Orange
- William Carlos Williams publishes Pictures From Brueghel and Other Poems
- Jacques Ferron publishes Contes du pays incertain
- Michel de Ghelderode dies
- Overseen by the RAND Corporation, work begins toward the development of an ambitious communication network, which eventually leads to the creation of the Internet
- The Belgian colony of Ruanda-Urundi gains its independence, becoming two nations: Rwanda and Burundi
- Reynolds Price publishes A Long and Happy Life
- John Lanchester is born
- Barbara Reynolds completes and publishes the third volume of Dorothy L. Sayers’s translation of Dante’s Divina Commedia, titled Paradise
- William Faulkner publishes The Reivers
- Alan Dugan receives the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Poems
- Frank Loesser and Abe Burrows receive the Pulitzer Prize in drama for How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying
- Edwin O’Connor receives the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The Edge of Sadness
- Vladimir Nabokov publishes Pale Fire
- Marshall McLuhan publishes The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man
- William Faulkner dies
- Rosario Castellanos publishes Oficio de tinieblas
- Rachel Carson publishes Silent Spring
- William Stafford publishes Traveling through the Dark
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn publishes Odin den’Ivana Denisovicha (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich)
- John Steinbeck receives the Nobel Prize for Literature
- Madeleine L’engle publishes A Wrinkle in Time
- Barbara W. Tuchman publishes The Guns of August
- James Reaney publishes Twelve Letters to a Small Town
- Robert Creeley publishes For Love: Poems, 1950-1960
- Doris Lessing publishes The Golden Notebook
- Tu Fu: Selected Poems is published
- Jean Little publishes Mine for Keeps
- Jack Spicer publishes The Heads of the Town up to the Aether
- Robert Bolt’s screenplay Lawrence of Arabia is adopted for a major motion picture by Columbia Pictures
- William Stanley Braithwaite dies
- Zbigniew Herbert publishes Barbarzyna w ogrodzie (The Barbarian in the Garden)
- Robinson Jeffers dies
- E. E. Cummings dies
- Hermann Hesse dies
- Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is produced
- Ken Kesey publishes One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
- Edward Lewis Wallant dies (December 5)
- Richard Aldington dies (July 27)