Calendar of Literary Facts
1997
- Jonathan Kellerman publishes Survival of the Fittest
- Robert Ludlum publishes The Matarese Countdown
- Vonda McIntyre receives the Nebula Award for The Moon and the Sun
- Larry McMurtry publishes Comanche Moon
- Steven Millhauser receives the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for Martin Dressler
- Robert Pinsky is named U.S. Poet Laureate
- Ruth Rendell is named a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master
- In Lima, Peru, government troops storm the compound of the Japanese envoy and free 71 hostages
- Rebel forces oust President Sese Seko Mobutu of Zaire
- Lisel Mueller receives the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Alive Together: New and Selected Poems
- J. K. Rowling publishes Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
- Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive is first performed
- Ted Hughes receives the Whitbread Book of the Year Award for Tales from Ovid
- Carl Hiaasen publishes Lucky You
- Mitch Albom publishes Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life’s Greatest Lesson
- Dominick Dunne publishes Another City, not My Own
- Michael Crichton publishes Airframe
- Penelope Fitzgerald receives the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for The Blue Flower
- Dario Fo receives the Nobel Prize for Literature
- Paulo Freire dies
- Owen Barfield dies
- Arundhati Roy receives the Booker Prize for The God of Small Things
- William S. Burroughs dies (August 2)
- Allen Ginsberg dies (April 5)
- Amos Tutuola dies (June 6)
- P. H. Newby dies (June 9)
- Michael Dorris dies (April 11)
- Harold Robbins dies (October 14)
- Laurie Lee dies (May 14)
- James A. Michener dies (October 16)
- James Dickey dies (January 19)
- Denise Levertov dies (December 20)
- V. S. Pritchett dies (March 21)
- Andrei Sinyavsky dies (February 25)
- The Million Woman March, focusing upon health care, self-help, and education, is held in Philadelphia (October 25)
- Brendan Gill dies (December 27)
- Kathy Acker dies (November 29)
