Calendar of Literary Facts
1996
- Dorothy Livesay dies
- John Lanchester receives the Whitbread Award for First Novel for The Debt to Pleasure
- Jonathan Larson is posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in drama for Rent
- Terry McMillan publishes How Stella Got Her Groove Back
- Jack Miles receives the Pulitzer Prize for Biography/Autobiography for God: A Biography
- Danielle Steel publishes The Gift
- Graham Swift receives the Booker Prize for Last Orders
- Wislawa Szymborska receives the Nobel Prize for Literature
- Purported evidence of primitive life is found on a meteorite from Mars
- A sheep named Dolly becomes the first mammal to be cloned from the cells of an adult animal
- Jorie Graham receives the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for The Dream of the Unified Field
- Lisel Mueller publishes Allive Together: New and Selected Poems
- Helen Fielding publishes Bridget Jones’s Diary
- Stephen King publishes The Green Mile
- Seamus Heaney receives the Whitbread Book of the Year Award for The Spirit Level
- Robert Hass receives the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry for Sun under Wood
- Patricia Cornwell publishes From Potter’s Field
- Andre Dubus publishes Dancing after Hours: Stories
- Stanley L. Elkin is posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction for Mrs. Ted Bliss
- Ken Follett publishes The Third Twin
- Dick Francis receives the Edgar Award for Best Novel for Come to Grief and is named a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master
- Richard Ford receives the Pulitzer Prize in fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in fiction for Independence Day
- Marguerite Duras dies (March 3)
- José Donoso dies (December 7)
- Bienvenido Santos dies (January 7)
- Richard Condon dies (April 9)
- Lonne Elder III dies (June 11)
- Erma Bombeck dies (April 12)
- George Mackay Brown dies (April 13)
- Caroline Blackwood dies (February 14)
- George Starbuck dies (August 15)
- Odysseus Elytis dies (March 18)
- Carl Sagan dies (December 20)
- Norman MacCaig dies (January 23)
- Joseph Mitchell dies (May 24)
- Jonathan Larson dies, the day before the off-Broadway opening of his rock opera Rent (January 25)
- Mary Lavin dies (March 26)
- Joseph Brodsky dies (January 28)
- Sheldon Vanauken dies (October 28)
- Eugenia Price dies (May 28)
- Shusaku Endo dies (September 29)
- Sinclair Ross dies (February 29)
- Timothy Leary dies (May 31)
