Calendar of Literary Facts

• Calendar of Literary Facts

Calendar of Literary Facts

1974

• Nadine Gordimer and Stanley Middleton share the Booker Prize for their respective works The Conservationist and Holiday
• R. K. Narayan publishes My Days: A Memoir
• John Crowe Ransom dies
• Rosemary Rogers publishes Sweet Savage Love
• Angela Davis publishes Angela Davis: An Autobiography
• Robert M. Pirsig publishes Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
• Marilyn Hacker publishes Presentation Piece
• Nadine Gordimer publishes The Conservationist
• Dario Fo publishes Morte accidentale di un anarchico (Accidental Death of an Anarchist)
• Nadine Gordimer receives the Booker Prize in fiction for The Conservationist
• Gary Snyder publishes Turtle Island
• Gail Godwin publishes The Odd Woman
• Mark Medoff receives Obie Award for When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder?
• James Welch publishes Winter in the Blood
• U.S. President Richard Nixon resigns from office in the wake of the Watergate scandal
• Augusto Roa Bastos publishes Yo el supremo (I the Supreme)
• Ernesto Sábato publishes Abaddon, el Exterminador
• Russell Kirk publishes The Roots of American Order
• Martin Amis publishes The Rachel Papers
• Dave Smith publishes The Fisherman’s Whore
• George E. Kelly dies
• Longtime emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, is deposed
• A coup deposes the military dictatorship in Portugal
• Upon assuming the U.S. presidency, Gerald R. Ford pardons former-President Richard M. Nixon
• Because of his book The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is arrested and forced to leave the Soviet Union; he settles first in Zurich, then (in 1976) in Vermont, where he continues writing
• Philip K. Dick publishes Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
• John Jakes publishes The Bastard
• Terrence McNalley receives Obie Award for Bad Habits
• Clarence Major publishes The Syncopated Cakewalk
• Peter Benchley publishes Jaws
• Frank Chin’s The Year of the Dragon is produced
• Barbara Chase-Riboud publishes From Memphis and Peking
• Michael Shaara publishes The Killer Angels
• Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music is produced
• Miguel Angel Asturias dies
• Paula Gunn Allen publishes The Blind Lion
• May Sarton publishes Collected Poems: 1930-1973
• Clive James publishes The Metropolitan Critic
• Mark Medoff publishes When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder?
• Peter Shaffer’s Equus is produced
• Annie Dillard publishes Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
• Robert Cormier publishes The Chocolate War
• Paer Lagerkvist dies
• Miguel Mendez publishes Peregrinos de Aztlan
• Matsuo Basho’s Bad Habits is published
• Austin Clarke dies
• Gayl Jones publishes Chile Woman
• Lucille Clifton publishes An Ordinary Woman
• Stephen King publishes Carrie: A Novel of a Girl with a Frightening Power
• Nelson DeMille publishes The Sniper
• Anne Sexton dies (October 4)
• Georgette Heyer dies (July 4)
• Rosario Castellanos dies (August 7)
• Henry Aaron hits his 715th home run, surpassing Babe Ruth’s record and making “Hammerin’ Hank” the all-time home-run leader (April 8)
• Donald Goines dies (October 21)
• Cyril Connolly dies (November 25)
• H. E. Bates dies (January 29)