The Calendar of Literary Facts contains more than 6,500 events in literary history.
1980 Literary Facts
Pat Booth publishes The Lady and the Champ
Toni Cade Bambara publishes The Salt Eaters
Jean M. Auel publishes The Clan of the Cave Bear
Judy Blume publishes Superfudge
Ernesto Cardenal publishes Zero Hour and Other Documentary Poems
Peter Straub publishes Shadowland
Jeffrey Archer publishes Kane & Abel
Ann Rule publishes The Stranger Beside Me
Luis Omar Salinas publishes Afternoon of the Unreal
Danielle Steel publishes Loving
James Schuyler publishes The Morning of the Poem
The Antoinette Perry Award (Tony) Award for Best Play is awarded to Amadeus by Peter Shaffer
Margaret Truman publishes Murder in the White House
Ntozake Shange publishes Mother Courage and Her Children
Eric Van Lustbader publishes The Ninja
Henry Miller dies
Lanford Wilson receives the Pulitzer Prize in drama for Talley’s Folly
Margaret Crane dies
J. M. Coetzee publishes Waiting for the Barbarians
Dean Koontz publishes Whispers
Pat Conroy publishes The Lords of Discipline
Ethel Davis Wilson dies
Ray A. Young Bear publishes Winter of the Salamander: The Keeper of Importance
Umberto Eco publishes Il Nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose)
Kevin Major publishes Far from Shore
W. D. Valgardson publishes Gentle Sinners
Augusto Roa Bastos publishes Still Life with Woodpecker
Anita Desai publishes Clear Light of Day
Milan Kundera publishes The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
W. P. Kinsella publishes Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa
Ronald Harwood’s drama The Dresser is first produced
Paul Muldoon publishes Why Brownlee Left
Katherine Anne Porter dies
Czesław Miłosz receives the Nobel Prize for Literature
Jayanta Mahapatra publishes Relationship
Robert R. McCammon publishes The Night Boat
Wendy Rose publishes Lost Copper
Simon J. Ortiz publishes Fightback: For the Sake of the People, for the Sake of the Land
Hanay Geiogamah publishes New Native American Drama: Three Plays
Gene Wolfe publishes The Shadow of the Torturer
Al Young publishes Ask Me Now
An attempt by the American military to rescue American embassy staff held hostage in Iran fails
Mount St. Helens (in Washington) erupts, darkening the skies with ash and destroying the surrounding area for many miles
The Solidarity trade union is formed in Poland during a shipyard strike in Gdansk
Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) gains its independence
Iraq and Iran wage war against each other
“The Poems of Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford” is published in Studies in Philology
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty is published
The video rental business begins
John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces is published
Anne Tyler publishes Morgan’s Passing
William Golding receives the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage
Camara Laye dies
Explore: The Dark Child, The Radiance of the King, Camara Laye
Muriel Rukeyser dies
Explore: Effort at Speech Between Two People, Muriel Rukeyser
Robert E. Hayden dies
James Wright dies
Roland Barthes dies
Explore: Roland Barthes, The Empire of Signs
Jean-Paul Sartre dies
Explore: No Exit, The Wall, Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre, How does Sartre define and distinguish "anguish," "forlornness," and "despair"?
Alejo Carpentier dies
Explore: The Kingdom of This World, The Lost Steps, Journey Back to the Source, Alejo Carpentier
C. P. Snow dies
Explore: C. P. Snow
David Mercer dies
Explore: David Mercer
Marshall McLuhan dies
Explore: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media