Calendar of Literary Facts
1970
- Dee Brown publishes Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West
- Marxist Salvador Allende is elected president of Chile
- U.S. President Richard Nixon announces that the American theater of operations in the Vietnam conflict has been expanded into Cambodia; massive anti-war protests erupt in the wake of this news
- A unit of the Ohio National Guard fires on a group of anti-war protesters at Kent State University, killing four
- A typhoon’s floodwaters kill 500,000 people in East Pakistan
- Charles Alan Reich publishes The Greening of America
- Irwin Shaw publishes Rich Man, Poor Man
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn receives the Nobel Prize for Literature
- E. M. Forster dies
- Lawrence Sanders publishes The Anderson Tapes
- Tomas Transtroemer publishes Moerkerseende (Night Vision)
- Peter Shaffer publishes Sleuth
- Erle Stanley Gardner dies
- Stephen Sondheim publishes Company
- A civil war in Nigeria ends with the capitulation of Biafran separatists
- Garry Wills publishes Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man
- Shiva Naipaul publishes Fireflies
- Charles Olson dies
- Paul Antschel dies
- Donald E. Westlake introduces his bungling criminal character John A. Dortmunder in the novel The Hot Rock
- Saul Bellow publishes Mr. Sammler’s Planet
- Bernice Rubens receives the Booker Prize for The Elected Member
- Cyrus Colter publishes The Beach Umbrella
- François Mauriac dies
- S. Y. Agnon dies
- Bertrand Russell dies
- Richard Howard receives the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Untitled Subjects
- Jean Stafford receives the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for her Collected Stories
- Dave Smith publishes Bull Island
- Charles Gordone receives the Pulitzer Prize in drama for No Place to Be Somebody
- Sidney Corman publishes Livingdying
- John Dos Passos dies
- Dean Koontz publishes Beastchild
- Robert E. Hayden publishes Words in the Mourning Time
- Jon Anderson publishes Death and Friends
- José Donoso publishes El obsceno pajaro de la noche (The Obscene Bird of Night)
- Edna O’Brien publishes A Pagan Place: A Novel
- Lorine Niedecker publishes My Life By Water: Collected Poems 1936-1968
- Larry Niven publishes Ringworld
- Louise Bogan dies
- Erich Maria Remarque dies
- Judy Blume publishes Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
- Robert Kroetsch publishes The Studhorse Man
- Joan Didion publishes Play It as It Lays
- Stanley Ellin publishes The Bind
- Paul Zindel receives an Obie Award for best new American play for The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds
- W. S. Merwin publishes The Carrier of Ladders
- Patsauq Markoosie publishes Harpoon of the Hunter
- Alvin Toffler publishes Future Shock
- Maya Angelou publishes I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
- Demetrio Aguilera Malta publishes Siete lunas y siete serpientes (Seven Serpents and Seven Moons)
- Robert Anderson publishes I Never Sang for My Father
- Richard Bach publishes Jonathan Livingston Seagull
- James Dickey publishes Deliverance
- Robertson Davies publishes Fifth Business
- Ishmael Scott Reed publishes 19 Necromancers from Now
- John O’Hara dies (April 11)
- Arthur Adamov dies (March 15)
- Kimitake Hiraoka (Yukio Mishima) dies (November 25)
- Lorine Niedecker dies (December 31)
