Calendar of Literary Facts
1998
- José Saramago receives the Nobel Prize for Literature
- Anne Rice publishes Pandora: New Tales of the Vampires
- Toni Morrison publishes Paradise
- Alice Munro receives the National Book Critic’s Circle Award for Fiction for The Love of a Good Woman
- Anna Quindlen publishes Black and Blue
- Philip Roth receives the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for American Pastoral
- J. K. Rowling publishes Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
- Tom Wolfe publishes A Man in Full
- Charles Wright receives the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Black Zodiac
- William Hoffman publishes Tidewater Blood
- The U.S. Congress impeaches President Bill Clinton
- India and Pakistan perform their first nuclear tests and issue warlike threats to each other
- Northern Irish peace accords are signed
- Violence erupts in Kosovo as Serbian troops attack ethnic Albanian separatists
- The U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania are bombed by terrorists
- Paula Vogel receives the Pulitzer Prize in drama for How I Learned to Drive
- Michael Cunningham publishes The Hours
- Ian McEwan receives the Booker Prize for Amsterdam
- Sue Grafton publishes N Is for Noose
- Patricia Cornwell publishes Unnatural Exposure
- Sheila Watson dies
- Ted Hughes is posthumously awarded the Whitbread Book of the Year Award for Birthday Letters
- John Irving publishes A Widow for One Year
- Stephen King publishes Bag of Bones
- Barbara Kingsolver publishes The Poisonwood Bible
- John Grisham publishes The Partner
- Eldridge Cleaver dies (May 1)
- Allen Drury dies (September 2)
- Henry Steele Commager dies (March 2)
- Lawrence Sanders dies (February 7)
- Halldór Laxness dies (February 8)
- Julian Green dies (August 13)
- Cleveland Amory dies (October 14)
- John Hawkes dies (May 15)
- Benjamin Spock dies (March 15)
- Iain Crichton Smith dies (October 15)
- William Gaddis dies (December 16)
- Octavio Paz dies (April 19)
- Eric Ambler dies (October 22)
- Wright Morris dies (April 25)
- W. O. Mitchell dies (February 25)
- Ted Hughes dies (October 28)
- Zbigniew Herbert dies (July 28)
- Margaret Walker dies (November 30)
- Robert Lewis Taylor dies (September 30)
