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

Ben Okri receives the Booker Prize for The Famished Road

Auberon Waugh publishes Will This Do?: The First Fifty Years of Auberon Waugh

Mark Helprin publishes A Soldier of the Great War

Francisco (de Paula y Garcia Duarte) Ayala is awarded the Miguel de Cervantes National Literary Prize

Neil Simon receives the Pulitzer Prize in drama for Lost in Yonkers

Jane Smiley publishes A Thousand Acres

Maeve Binchy publishes Circle of Friends

Beryl Bainbridge publishes An Awfully Big Adventure

John Singleton writes the screenplay for and directs Boyz N the Hood, a major motion picture by Columbia Pictures

Douglas Coupland publishes Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

Mona Van Duyn receives the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Near Changes

Josephine Hart publishes Damage

Bret Easton Ellis publishes American Psycho

Leslie Marmon Silko publishes Almanac of the Dead

Paule Marshall publishes Daughters

John Grisham publishes The Firm

P. J. O’Rourke publishes Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government

Nadine Gordimer receives the Nobel Prize for Literature

Alexandra Ripley publishes Scarlett: The Sequel to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind

Adrienne Rich publishes The Atlas of a Difficult World: Poems 1988-91

Rohinton Mistry publishes Such a Long Journey

The World Wide Web is established; the “New Media” begins to flourish, making possible communication of every sort independent of established print media

The Gulf War erupts in Kuwait and is over in a few days; Iraqi troops are driven from Kuwait and sue for peace

A cyclone in the Bay of Bengal kills 135,000 people in Bangladesh

Mikhail Gorbachev resigns as the last General Secretary of the Soviet Union

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics dissolves into its consituent nations

President F. W. de Klerk declares an end to all apartheid laws in South Africa

Ethnic warfare rages periodically in the Balkins between Serbian, Bosnian, and Croatia

The two plays in Robert Schenkkan’s The Kentucky Cycle are produced

Etheridge Knight dies

Explore: Etheridge Knight, The Idea of Ancestry

John D. Voelker dies

Graham Greene dies

Explore: The Destructors, The Quiet American, Graham Greene

Max Frisch dies

Explore: Homo Faber, The Firebugs, Max Frisch

James Schuyler dies

Explore: James Schuyler

Henry Kreisel dies

Explore: The Broken Globe

A. B. Guthrie Jr. dies

Explore: The Way West, The Big Sky

Jerzy Kosinski dies

Explore: The Painted Bird, Being There, Jerzy Kosinski

Howard Nemerov dies

Explore: Deep Woods, Howard Nemerov

Isaac Bashevis Singer dies

Explore: The King of the Fields, Isaac Bashevis Singer

Thomas Tryon dies

Explore: Harvest Home, Thomas Tryon

Frank Yerby dies

Explore: The Foxes of Harrow, Frank Yerby

Artur Lundkvist dies