The Calendar of Literary Facts contains more than 6,500 events in literary history.

Martin Amis publishes Dead Babies

Brendan Gill publishes Here at “The New Yorker”

Gary Snyder receives the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Turtle Island

Michael Shaara receives the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The Killer Angels

The Antoinette Perry Award (Tony) for Best Play is awarded to Equus by Peter Shaffer

Tom Stoppard publishes Travesties

Sam Shepard receives Obie Award for Action

Ntozake Shange publishes for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf: A Choreopoem

Paul Theroux publishes The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train through Asia

Malcolm Bradbury publishes The History Man

Ed Bullins publishes The Taking of Miss Janie

Nina Bawden publishes The Peppermint Pig

Bernard Slade Newbound publishes Same Time, Next Year

John Ashbery publishes Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

Ron Arias publishes The Road to Tamazunchale

David Bradley Jr. publishes South Street

Susan Brownmiller publishes Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape

Donald Barthelme publishes The Dead Father

Saul Bellow publishes Humboldt’s Gift

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala receives the Booker Prize in fiction for Heat and Dust

Mary Higgins Clark publishes Where Are the Children?

Paul Horgan publishes Lamy of Santa Fe: His Life and Times

Harry Patterson publishes The Eagle Has Landed

Anne Hebert receives the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poems

Ian McEwan publishes First Love, Last Rites

Walter Dean Myers publishes Fast Sam, Cool Clyde, and Stuff

Colin Dexter publishes Last Bus to Woodstock

Annie Dillard receives Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Larry McMurtry publishes Terms of Endearment

David Lodge publishes Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses

Lanford Wilson receives an Obie Award for The Mound Builders

Thornton Wilder dies

St.-John Perse dies

Michael Anthony Dorris publishes Native Americans: Five Hundred Years After

E. L. Doctorow publishes Ragtime

Robertson Davies publishes World of Wonders

James Clavell publishes Shogun

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala publishes Heat and Dust

Harlan Ellison publishes Deathbird Stories: A Pantheon of Modern Gods

Ed Bullins receives an Obie Award for distinguished playwriting

Saigon surrenders to North Vietnamese forces, ending the Vietnam conflict

A joint U.S.-Soviet space mission culminates in the docking of an American Apollo craft with the Soviet craft Soyuz

Archeologists in China uncover an “army” of 6000 life-size pottery figures

Longtime Spanish leader Francisco Franco is succeeded by King Juan Carlos, who institutes democratic reforms

Portugal grants independence to Macau and its other colonies

Khmer Rouge troops under Pol Pot herd Cambodian city-dwellers into the open country in an experiment in forced agrarianism; approximately two million people are then massacred or die from overwork or starvation

Civil war rages in Lebanon between Muslims and Christians

Ethiopian troops defeat an uprising of separatist guerrillas in the region of Eritrea

Eugenio Montale receives the Nobel Prize for Literature

Ivo Andrič dies

P. G. Wodehouse dies

Explore: The Inimitable Jeeves, Leave It to Psmith, P. G. Wodehouse

Michael Cristofer’s drama The Shadow Box is first performed

Explore: The Shadow Box, Michael Cristofer

Lionel Trilling dies

Explore: The Middle of the Journey, Lionel Trilling, Of This Time, Of That Place

Hannah Arendt dies

Explore: Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism