Calendar of Literary Facts

1968

  • Philip K. Dick publishes Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which is later published as Blade Runner (1982)
  • Nikki Giovanni publishes Black Feeling, Black Talk
  • Jules Feiffer publishes Little Murders
  • John Guare receives an Obie Award for Muzeeka
  • William Styron receives the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The Confessions of Nat Turner
  • Alvin Toffler publishes The Schoolhouse in the City
  • Sam Shepard receives Obie Awards for Forensic and the Navigators and Melodrama Play
  • Luis Valdez receives an Obie Award for “demonstrating the politics of survival”
  • Upton Sinclair dies
  • John Singleton is born
  • Tom Wolfe publishes The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
  • Senator Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated
  • Donald Davidson dies
  • Viet Cong forces conduct the Tet Offensive in South Vietnam; though the offensive fails, it demoralizes U.S. and South Vietnamese armed forces
  • Howard Lindsay dies
  • Angered by the depiction of African Americans in The Confessions of Nat Turner, a group of scholars issue a critical reply in William Styron’s “Nat Turner”: Ten Black Writers Respond
  • Edward Abbey publishes Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness
  • Arthur C. Clarke publishes 2001: A Space Odyssey, based upon his motion-picture screenplay written with Stanley Kubrick
  • Edna Ferber dies
  • Conrad Richter dies
  • The Autobiography of W. E. Burghardt Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century is published
  • The pro-democratic “Prague Spring” movement in Czechoslovakia is suppressed by Warsaw Pact troops and tanks
  • Students in the U.S. and Europe participate in frequent protests against American military involvement in Vietnam
  • Pope Paul VI issues a landmark encyclical against artificial birth control
  • The American spacecraft Apollo 8 orbits the moon, with three astronauts aboard
  • Yasunari Kawabata receives the Nobel Prize for Literature
  • Vaclav Havel publishes Ztizena noznost soustredeni (The Increased Difficulty of Concentration)
  • Gunnar Ekeloef dies
  • Roberto Arlt’s Los siete locos (The Seven Madmen) is published
  • N. Scott Momaday publishes House Made of Dawn
  • Dennis Lee publishes Civil Elegies
  • Anne McCaffrey publishes Dragonflight
  • Dennis Lee receives the Governor-General’s Award for Civil Elegies
  • Mordecai Richler publishes Cocksure
  • Gwendolyn Brooks publishes In the Mecca
  • V. S. Pritchett publishes A Cab at the Door: A Memoir
  • Roch Carrier publishes La Guerre, Yes Sir!
  • John Brunner publishes Stand on Zanzibar
  • John Berryman’s His Toy, His Dream, His Rest is published
  • Anthony Hecht receives the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for The Hard Hours
  • Israel Horovitz publishes The Indian Wants the Bronx
  • Susan Hill publishes Gentleman and Ladies
  • Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated
  • C. Day Lewis is appointed Poet Laureate of Britain by Queen Elizabeth II
  • Songs of Leonard Cohen is published
  • Leonard Cyril Deighton publishes Only When I Larf
  • Arthur Hailey publishes Airport
  • Bella Akhatovna Akhmadulina publishes Oznob (Fever and Other Poems)
  • Samuel R. Delany publishes Nova
  • Eldridge Cleaver publishes Soul on Ice
  • Ayi Kwei Armah publishes The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
  • George Dillon dies (May 9)
  • Thomas Merton dies (December 10)
  • Salvatore Quasimodo dies (June 14)
  • John Steinbeck dies (December 20)
  • Edwin O’Connor dies (March 23)