Calendar of Literary Facts
1976
- Caroline Blackwood publishes The Stepdaughter
- Luisa Valenzuela publishes Clara: Thirteen Short Stories and a Novel
- Bernice Zamora publishes Restless Serpents
- Victor Hernandez Cruz publishes Tropicalization
- William Trevor Cox publishes The Children of Dynmouth
- Ruth Rendell publishes The Fallen Curtain: Eleven Mystery Stories by an Edgar Award-Winning Writer
- Manuel Puig publishes El beso de la mujer arana (The Kiss of the Spider Woman)
- Estela Portillo Trambley publishes Rain of Scorpions and Other Writings
- Janet Dailey publishes No Quarter Asked
- Basil H. Johnston publishes Ojibway Heritage
- Robert Nye publishes Falstaff: Being the “Acta Domini Johannis Fastolfe”
- Peter Handke publishes Die linkshaendige Frau: Erzaehlung (The Left-Handed Woman)
- Alex Haley publishes Roots: The Saga of an American Family
- Clive Cussler publishes Raise the Titanic
- Lillian Hellman publishes Scoundrel Time
- Renata Adler receives the Ernest Hemingway Prize for best first novel for Speedboat
- David Storey receives the Booker Prize for Saville
- Michael Bennett receives the Pulitzer Prize in drama for A Chorus Line (Book by Jams Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante, music by Marvin Hamlisch, lyrics by Edward Kleban)
- Civil war rages in Angola
- Riots break out in Soweto in South Africa
- Spain grants independence to its African colony known as the Spanish Sahara
- North and South Vietnam are officially united under a communist government
- A group of alleged anti-government conspiritors, the “Gang of Four,” is arrested in China
- Chinese leader Mao Tze-tung dies and is succeeded by Hua Kuo-feng
- The U.S. National Academy of Sciences declares that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs, or Freons) can deplete Earth’s Ozone Layer
- Pat Conroy publishes The Great Santini
- Robert B. Parker publishes Promised Land
- Norman MacLean publishes A River Runs Through It and Other Stories
- Paddy Chayefsky’s screenplay Network is completed for a major motion picture by United Artists
- Thomas Tryon publishes Crowned Heads
- Anne Rivers Siddons publishes Heartbreak Hotel
- Jeffrey Archer publishes Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less
- John Ashbery receives Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
- Peter Blue Cloud publishes Turtle, Bear, and Wolf
- Agatha Christie dies
- Saul Bellow receives both the Pulitzer Prize in fiction (for Humboldt’s Gift) and the Nobel Prize for Literature
- Peter Benchley publishes The Deep
- Isaac Asimov publishes The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories
- Ann Beattie publishes Chilly Scenes of Winter
- Lawrence Block publishes In the Midst of Death
- Forrest Carter publishes The Education of Little Tree
- Alistair MacLeod publishes The Lost Salt Gift of Blood
- Judith Guest publishes Ordinary People
- Carolyn Forche publishes Gathering the Tribes
- James Merrill receives the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Divine Comedies
- Tess Gallagher publishes Instructions to the Double
- Anne Rice publishes Interview with the Vampire
- Francine du Plessix Gray publishes Lovers and Tyrants
- James Merrill publishes Divine Comedies
- Adolfo Bioy Casares publishes Historias fantásticas
- José Lezama Lima dies (August 9)
- William Sansom dies (April 20)
- André Malraux dies (November 23)
- D. L. Coburn’s drama The Gin Game is first performed (September 24)
- Eyvind Johnson dies (August 25)
- Richard Hughes dies (April 28)
