Calendar of Literary Facts

1964

  • Sabine R. Ulibarri publishes Tierra Amarilla: Cuentos de Nuevo Mexico (Tierra Amarilla: Stories of New Mexico)
  • Ngugi wa Thiong’o publishes Weep Not, Child
  • Raja Rao publishes Kanthapura
  • Neil Simon publishes Barefoot in the Park
  • Jean-Paul Sartre receives the Nobel Prize for Literature (refused)
  • Austin C. Clarke publishes The Survivors of the Crossing
  • Margaret Laurence publishes The Stone Angel
  • David Mercer publishes The Generations: A Trilogy of Plays
  • Alex La Guma publishes And a Threefold Cord
  • W. E. B. Du Bois’s Selected Poems is published
  • John D. Macdonald publishes The Deep Blue Good-By, which introduces the fictional detective Travis McGee
  • Joe Orton publishes Entertaining Mr. Sloane
  • Sean O’Casey dies
  • Irving Wallace publishes The Man
  • Andrei Voznesensky publishes Antimiry (Antiworlds)
  • Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade is produced
  • Wendell Berry publishes November Twenty-six Nineteen Hundred Sixty-Three
  • E. J. Pratt dies
  • John Berryman publishes 77 Dream Songs
  • Christopher Okigbo publishes Limits
  • Theodore Roethke’s The Far Field is published
  • Nella Larsen dies
  • Louis Simpson receives the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for At the End of the Open Road
  • Raymond Souster publishes The Colour of the Times: The Collected Poems
  • Dame Edith Sitwell dies
  • War breaks out in Cyprus between Turks and Greeks; the U.N. sends in a peacekeeping force to restore order
  • Marshall McLuhan publishes Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
  • President Lyndon Johnson issues the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, calling for increased American military presence in Vietnam
  • Timothy Leary publishes The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, with Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert
  • Saul Bellow publishes Herzog
  • Shel Silverstein publishes The Giving Tree
  • Shirley Ann Grau publishes The Keepers of the House
  • Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin produces his play Oda Oak Oracle: A Legend of Black Peoples, Told of Gods and God, Of Hope and Love, Of Fears and Sacrifices
  • Zanzibar and Tanganyika join to form Tanzania
  • Juan Bosch publishes Crisis de la democracia de America en la Republica Dominicana (The Unfinished Experiment: Democracy in the Dominican Republic)
  • Thomas Berger publishes Little Big Man
  • Raymond Souster receives Canada’s Governor-General Award for The Colour of the Times
  • Adrienne Kennedy receives an Obie Award for Funnyhouse of a Negro
  • Roald Dahl publishes Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
  • Nick Bantock publishes Dutchman
  • A. R. Ammons publishes Expressions of Sea Level
  • Margaret Atwood publishes The Circle Game
  • Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev is replaced by Alexi Kosygin and Leonid Brezhnev
  • Frans Eemil Sillanpää dies
  • Flannery O’Connor dies (August 3)
  • Bret Easton Ellis is born (March 7)
  • The Beatles appear on The Ed Sullivan Show, launching Beatlemania in the U.S. (February 9)
  • Ian Fleming dies (August 12)
  • Rachel Carson dies (April 14)
  • Brendan Behan dies (March 20)
  • Frank D. Gilroy’s drama The Subject Was Roses is first performed (May 25)