Calendar of Literary Facts
1963
- Mary Oliver publishes No Voyage, and Other Poems
- Rolf Hochhuth publishes Der Stellvertreter: Schauspiel (The Representative)
- John Rechy publishes City of Night
- Julio Cortázar publishes Rayuela (Hopscotch)
- Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything that Rises Must Converge” is published
- Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C. before an audience of 200,000 “Freedom Marchers”
- William C. Knott publishes Junk Pitcher
- Ivan Klima publishes Hodina ticha
- The Pulitzer Prize in poetry is awarded to the late William Carlos Williams for Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems
- Kurt Vonnegut publishes Cat’s Cradle
- Tristan Tzara dies
- Charles Stevenson Wright publishes The Messenger
- William Carlos Williams dies
- Robert Frost dies
- Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tershkova becomes the first woman in space
- A Buddhist-led coup overthrows the U.S.-backed government of South Vietnam
- The Pulitzer Prize in fiction is awarded to the late William Faulkner for The Reivers
- Giorgos Seferis receives the Nobel Prize for Literature
- Louis Simpson publishes At the End of the Open Road
- Barbara W. Tuchman receives the Pulitzer Prize for The Guns of August
- Enrique Buenaventura publishes La tragedia del rey Christophe
- Dennis Brutus publishes Sirens, Knuckles, Boots
- Juan Bosch publishes David: Biografia de un rey (David: The Biography of a King)
- Enrique Buenaventura publishes Un requiem por el Padre Las Casas
- Suzan-Lori Parks is born
- Morley Callaghan publishes That Summer in Paris: Memories of Tangled Friendships with Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Some Others
- Maurice Sendak publishes Where the Wild Things Are
- Michael Chabon is born
- Gordon Parks publishes The Learning Tree
- John Le Carré publishes The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
- The New York Review of Books begins publication
- Jean Cocteau dies
- Cyprian Ekwensi publishes Beautiful Feathers
- Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar is published
- Theodore Roethke dies (August 1)
- Richard M. Weaver dies (April 2)
- Oliver La Farge dies (August 2)
- Louis MacNeice dies (September 3)
- Martin Luther King Jr. leads American blacks in a crusade against racial discrimination in Birmingham, Alabama (April 3)
- Luis Cernuda dies (November 5)
- Sylvia Plath dies (February 11)
- Clifford Odets dies (August 14)
- U.S. President John F. Kennedy is assassinated (November 22)
- Aldous Huxley dies (November 22)
- C. S. Lewis dies (November 22)
- W. E. B. Du Bois dies (August 27)
