Calendar of Literary Facts
- Linda Pastan publishes PM/AM: New and Selected Poems
- J. M. Coetzee receives the Booker Prize for Life and Times of Michael K.
- Barbara Taylor Bradford publishes Voice of the Heart
- Malcolm Bradbury publishes Rates of Exchange
- Amy Clampitt publishes The Kingfisher
- Thomas Berger publishes The Feud
- Marion Zimmer Bradley publishes The Mists of Avalon
- Sandra Cisneros publishes The House on Mango Street
- Oscar Hijuelos publishes Our House in the Last World
- Leon Rooke publishes Shakespeare’s Dog
- Timothy Zahn publishes The Blackcollar
- David Henry Hwang publishes F.O.B.
- Elmore Leonard publishes Stick
- Sir William Golding receives the Nobel Prize for Literature for his complete body of work
- Horton Foote publishes Tender Mercies
- Harvey Fierstein publishes La Cage aux folles
- Joseph F. Girzone publishes Joshua
- Robert B. Parker publishes PM/AM: New and Selected Poems
- Marsha Norman receives the Pulitzer Prize in drama for ’Night, Mother
- J. M. Coetzee publishes The Life and Times of Michael K
- Ariel Dorfman publishes Widows
- Jamaica Kincaid publishes At the Bottom of the River
- Martha Grimes publishes The Anodyne Necklace
- William Kennedy publishes Ironweed
- Vaclav Havel publishes A Private View
- William Trevor Cox publishes Fools of Fortune
- Beatrice Culleton publishes In Search of April Raintree
- Alice Walker receives the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The Color Purple
- Lanford Wilson receives an Obie Award (with Circle Repertory Company) for sustained achievement in Off-Broadway theater
- John Edgar Wideman publishes Sent for You Yesterday
- Athol Fugard publishes “Master Harold”And the Boys
- Larry Shue’s drama The Foreigner is produced
- The compact disc (CD) is introduced
- A famine in Ethiopia, brought on by drought, affects millions
- U.S. President Ronald Reagan announces his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), dubbed “Star Wars” by Senator Edward Kennedy and other opponents
- U.S. troops invade and liberate Grenada
- Violence erupts between the Sinhalese and the Tamils in Sri Lanka
- Galway Kinnell receives the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Selected Poems
- Mary Oliver publishes American Primitive
- Tennessee Williams dies. (Explore: The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Tennessee Williams,
What is Tennessee Williams' literary style?
I need to compare Williams to...) (February 25)
- Christina Stead dies. (Explore: The Little Hotel, The Man Who Loved Children, House of All Nations, Christina Stead) (March 31)
- Owen Dodson dies. (Explore: The Poetry of Dodson, Owen Dodson) (June 21)
- Alden Nowlan dies. (Explore: Alden Nowlan) (June 27)
- Kenneth Millar dies. (Explore: The Chill, The Underground Man) (July 11)
- Gabrielle Roy dies. (Explore: Gabrielle Roy, The Tin Flute) (July 13)
- Luis Buñuel dies. (Explore: Luis Buñuel) (July 29)
- Yves Theriault dies (October 20)
- A truck-bomb destroys the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 241 marines (October 23)
- Paul de Man dies. (Explore: Blindness and Insight) (December 21)