Calendar of Literary Facts
1975
- Ivo Andrič dies
- E. L. Doctorow publishes Ragtime
- Michael Anthony Dorris publishes Native Americans: Five Hundred Years After
- St.-John Perse dies
- Thornton Wilder dies
- Lanford Wilson receives an Obie Award for The Mound Builders
- David Lodge publishes Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses
- Larry McMurtry publishes Terms of Endearment
- Annie Dillard receives Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
- Colin Dexter publishes Last Bus to Woodstock
- Walter Dean Myers publishes Fast Sam, Cool Clyde, and Stuff
- Robertson Davies publishes World of Wonders
- James Clavell publishes Shogun
- Ruth Prawer Jhabvala publishes Heat and Dust
- Eugenio Montale receives the Nobel Prize for Literature
- Ethiopian troops defeat an uprising of separatist guerrillas in the region of Eritrea
- Civil war rages in Lebanon between Muslims and Christians
- Khmer Rouge troops under Pol Pot herd Cambodian city-dwellers into the open country in an experiment in forced agrarianism; approximately two million people are then massacred or die from overwork or starvation
- Portugal grants independence to Macau and its other colonies
- Longtime Spanish leader Francisco Franco is succeeded by King Juan Carlos, who institutes democratic reforms
- Archeologists in China uncover an “army” of 6000 life-size pottery figures
- A joint U.S.-Soviet space mission culminates in the docking of an American Apollo craft with the Soviet craft Soyuz
- Saigon surrenders to North Vietnamese forces, ending the Vietnam conflict
- Ed Bullins receives an Obie Award for distinguished playwriting
- Harlan Ellison publishes Deathbird Stories: A Pantheon of Modern Gods
- Ian McEwan publishes First Love, Last Rites
- Anne Hebert receives the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poems
- Harry Patterson publishes The Eagle Has Landed
- Ed Bullins publishes The Taking of Miss Janie
- Malcolm Bradbury publishes The History Man
- Paul Theroux publishes The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train through Asia
- Ntozake Shange publishes for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf: A Choreopoem
- Sam Shepard receives Obie Award for Action
- Tom Stoppard publishes Travesties
- The Antoinette Perry Award (Tony) for Best Play is awarded to Equus by Peter Shaffer
- Michael Shaara receives the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The Killer Angels
- Gary Snyder receives the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Turtle Island
- Brendan Gill publishes Here at “The New Yorker”
- Nina Bawden publishes The Peppermint Pig
- Bernard Slade Newbound publishes Same Time, Next Year
- Paul Horgan publishes Lamy of Santa Fe: His Life and Times
- Mary Higgins Clark publishes Where Are the Children?
- Ruth Prawer Jhabvala receives the Booker Prize in fiction for Heat and Dust
- Saul Bellow publishes Humboldt’s Gift
- Donald Barthelme publishes The Dead Father
- Susan Brownmiller publishes Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape
- David Bradley Jr. publishes South Street
- Ron Arias publishes The Road to Tamazunchale
- John Ashbery publishes Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
- Martin Amis publishes Dead Babies
- Hannah Arendt dies (December 4)
- Lionel Trilling dies (November 5)
- P. G. Wodehouse dies (February 14)
- Michael Cristofer’s drama The Shadow Box is first performed (October 30)
