Calendar of Literary Facts
1972
- Jean Shepherd publishes Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories and Other Disasters
- Howard Fast publishes The Hessian
- Charles Willeford publishes Cockfighter
- Eudora Welty publishes The Optimist’s Daughter
- Hyemeyohsts Storm publishes Seven Arrows
- Frederick Forsyth publishes The Tar-Aiym Krang
- Hunter S. Thompson publishes Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream
- Melvin Van Peebles publishes Harlem Party
- Barbara Tuchman receives the Pulitzer Prize for Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-1945
- Alex Comfort publishes The Joy of Sex
- Yasunari Kawabata dies
- Richard Adams publishes Watership Down
- Penelope Lively publishes The Driftway
- James Wright receives the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Collected Poems
- Kathleen E. Woodiwiss publishes The Flame and the Flower
- Taylor Caldwell publishes Captains and Kings
- Alan Dean Foster publishes The Tar-Aiym Krang
- Mark Van Doren dies
- Gloria Steinem founds Ms. magazine
- John Berger receives the Booker Prize for G
- Jason Miller’s That Championship Season is first performed
- Wallace Stegner receives the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for Angle of Repose
- Police capture Republican operatives “bugging” Democratic National Headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C.
- East Pakistan becomes and independent state known as Bangladesh
- The government of Ceylon changes the name of the island-nation to Sri Lanka
- Arab terrorists murder 11 Israeli athletes at the Olympic village in Munich
- Dr. Richard Leakey finds a 2.5-million-year-old fossil skull of a hominid in Kenya
- Donald Goines publishes Whoreson: The Story of a Ghetto Pimp
- Robert Ludlum publishes The Osterman Weekend
- Henry de Montherlant dies
- Rudolfo Anaya publishes Bless Me, Ultima
- Chinua Achebe receives Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Beware, Soul-Brother, and Other Poems
- Frank Chin publishes The Chickencoop Chinaman
- Toni Cade Bambara publishes Gorilla, My Love
- Don Delillo publishes End Zone
- Alan Ayckbourn publishes Absurd Person Singular
- Isaac Asimov publishes The Gods Themselves
- Ezra Pound dies
- Robert Newton Peck publishes A Day No Pigs Would Die
- Marianne Moore dies
- Barry Beckham publishes Runner Mack
- Margaret Drabble publishes The Needle’s Eye
- James Herriot publishes All Creatures Great and Small
- Maxine Kumin publishes Up Country: Poems of New England
- Roald Dahl publishes Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator: The Further Adventures of Charlie Bucket and Willy Wonka, Chocolate-Maker Extraordinary
- Robertson Davies publishes The Manticore
- Frederick Buechner publishes Open Heart
- Buchi Emecheta publishes In the Ditch
- Rolando Hinojosa-Smith publishes Estampas del valle y otras obras (Sketches of the Valley and Other Works)
- Judy Blume publishes Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing
- Heinrich Boell receives Nobel Prize for Literature
- Adam Clayton Powell Jr. dies (April 4)
- John Berryman dies (January 7)
- Kenneth Patchen dies (January 8)
- Edmund Wilson dies (June 13)
- A. M. Klein dies (August 21)
- C. Day Lewis dies (May 22)
- Ronald Frederick Delderfield dies (June 29)
