Calendar of Literary Facts

1961

  • Frantz Fanon publishes Les Damnes de la terre (The Damned)
  • John Joseph Mathews publishes The Osages: Children of the Middle Waters
  • W. O. Mitchell publishes Jake and the Kid
  • Harper Lee receives the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for To Kill a Mockingbird
  • The Antoinette Perry (Tony) Award for Best Play is awarded to both Becket and The Honor of God by Jean Anouilh
  • John Masefield publishes The Bluebells, and Other Verses
  • David Leavitt is born
  • John Osborne publishes Luther
  • Paule Marshall publishes Soul Clap Hands and Sing
  • Irving Stone publishes The Agony and the Ecstasy
  • James Baldwin publishes Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son
  • Tillie Olsen publishes Tell Me a Riddle: A Collection
  • Yves Theriault receives the Governor General’s Literary Award, Canada Council, for Ashini
  • Walker Percy publishes The Moviegoer
  • Alan Ayckbourn publishes Standing Room Only
  • Arnold Wesker publishes Chicken Soup with Barley
  • Jessie Redmon Fauset dies
  • Richard Hugo publishes A Run of Jacks
  • John Pepper Clark publishes Song of a Goat
  • Ernest Hemingway dies
  • George S. Kaufman dies
  • Ossie Davis publishes Purlie Victorious
  • Joseph Heller publishes Catch-22
  • Hilda Doolittle (“H.D.”) dies
  • Robert A. Heinlein publishes Stranger in a Strange Land
  • Charles Bukowski publishes Longshot Pomes for Broke Players
  • Saul Bellow publishes Seize the Day
  • James Thurber dies
  • Phyllis McGinley receives the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Times Three: Selected Verse from Three Decades with Seventy New Poems
  • Tad Mosel receives the Pulitzer Prize in drama for All the Way Home
  • Edward Lewis Wallant publishes The Pawnbroker
  • At the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy, Robert Frost, half-blinded by the glare of sunlight and snow, reads a portion of his poem “Dedication” and then recites his poem “The Gift Outright”
  • Syria withdraws from the United Arab Republic
  • American and South Vietnamese troops engage the Communist North Vietnamese and indigent Viet Cong in the second war in Vietnam
  • Algeria gains independence from France
  • Anti-Castro Cubans fail to regain Cuba in the Bay of Pigs invasion
  • East Germans and Soviets construct the Berlin Wall
  • Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becomes the first man to travel by rocket to outer space
  • Donald Davidson publishes The Long Street
  • Amnesty International, whose goal is to assist people suffering from human-rights abuses, is founded
  • Ivo Andrič receives the Nobel Prize for Literature
  • Julia Peterkin dies
  • Edwin O’Connor publishes The Edge of Sadness
  • John Ciardi publishes The Man Who Sang the Sillies
  • Luis Buñuel’s screenplay of Viridiana, co-written with Julio Alejandro, is brought to the motion-picture screen
  • John Hawkes publishes The Lime Twig
  • Margaret Atwood publishes Double Persephone
  • Ernesto Sábato publishes Sobre heroes y tumbas (On Heroes and Tombs)
  • Alan Dugan publishes Poems
  • Earl Hamner Jr. publishes Spencer’s Mountain
  • Robert Hillyer dies
  • Margaret Edson is born (July 4)
  • Frantz Fanon dies (December 6)
  • Whittaker Chambers dies (June 9)
  • Frank Loesser and Abe Burrows’s musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying is first performed (October 14)
  • Evelyn Waugh publishes “An Act of Homage and Reparation to P. G. Wodehouse”—perhaps the single-most influential plea for restoring Wodehouse’s reputation among the English—in the London Sunday Times (July 16)
  • Moss Hart dies (December 20)
  • Jonathan Larson is born (January 25)
  • Douglas Coupland is born (December 30)