Calendar of Literary Facts
1991
- The two plays in Robert Schenkkan’s The Kentucky Cycle are produced
- Bret Easton Ellis publishes American Psycho
- The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics dissolves into its consituent nations
- Paule Marshall publishes Daughters
- John Grisham publishes The Firm
- P. J. O’Rourke publishes Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government
- Nadine Gordimer receives the Nobel Prize for Literature
- Alexandra Ripley publishes Scarlett: The Sequel to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind
- Adrienne Rich publishes The Atlas of a Difficult World: Poems 1988-91
- Rohinton Mistry publishes Such a Long Journey
- The World Wide Web is established; the “New Media” begins to flourish, making possible communication of every sort independent of established print media
- The Gulf War erupts in Kuwait and is over in a few days; Iraqi troops are driven from Kuwait and sue for peace
- A cyclone in the Bay of Bengal kills 135,000 people in Bangladesh
- Mikhail Gorbachev resigns as the last General Secretary of the Soviet Union
- President F. W. de Klerk declares an end to all apartheid laws in South Africa
- Ethnic warfare rages periodically in the Balkins between Serbian, Bosnian, and Croatia
- Josephine Hart publishes Damage
- Mona Van Duyn receives the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Near Changes
- Auberon Waugh publishes Will This Do?: The First Fifty Years of Auberon Waugh
- Mark Helprin publishes A Soldier of the Great War
- Francisco (de Paula y Garcia Duarte) Ayala is awarded the Miguel de Cervantes National Literary Prize
- Maeve Binchy publishes Circle of Friends
- Neil Simon receives the Pulitzer Prize in drama for Lost in Yonkers
- Jane Smiley publishes A Thousand Acres
- Ben Okri receives the Booker Prize for The Famished Road
- Beryl Bainbridge publishes An Awfully Big Adventure
- Douglas Coupland publishes Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture
- Leslie Marmon Silko publishes Almanac of the Dead
- John Singleton writes the screenplay for and directs Boyz N the Hood, a major motion picture by Columbia Pictures
- Graham Greene dies (April 3)
- Jerzy Kosinski dies (May 3)
- Thomas Tryon dies (September 4)
- Max Frisch dies (April 4)
- Howard Nemerov dies (July 5)
- Etheridge Knight dies (March 10)
- Artur Lundkvist dies (December 11)
- James Schuyler dies (April 12)
- John D. Voelker dies (March 18)
- Henry Kreisel dies (April 22)
- Isaac Bashevis Singer dies (July 24)
- A. B. Guthrie Jr. dies (April 26)
- Frank Yerby dies (November 29)
