istoryworld
Events relating to literature
British author Laurie Lee remembers a Cotswold boyhood in Cider with Rosie
The Colossus is US author Sylvia Plath's first collection of poems
Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail is the first of many collections of poems by US poet Charles Bukowski
English poet John Betjeman publishes his long autobiographical poem Summoned by Bells
Irish author Edna O'Brien publishes her first novel, The Country Girls
US author Harper Lee publishes her first and only novel, To Kill a Mockingbird
US novelist John Barth publishes The Sot-Weed Factor, a picaresque life of Edmund Cook set on a family tobacco plantation in Maryland
Paul Scofield plays Thomas More in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons
US author John Updike begins to chart the fictional progress of Harry Angstrom, known as Rabbit, in Rabbit, Run
Penguin Books are prosecuted for obscenity for publishing D.H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, and are acquitted
Political activist Jane Jacobs publishes an influential polemic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
J.D. Salinger publishes Franny and Zooey, the second of his collections of stories about the Glass family
British author Roald Dahl publishes a novel for children, James and the Giant Peach
Caribbean novelist V.S. Naipaul features his Trinidad family in A House for Mr Biswas
US author Joseph Heller publishes his first novel, Catch-22, set in the last months of World War II
The novelist Ernest Hemingway kills himself with a shotgun in his log cabin in Idaho
In Babi Yar the dissident Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko tackles the subject of Russian anti-Semitism
British novelist Muriel Spark publishes The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, set in an Edinburgh school in the 1930s
James Baldwin's third novel Another Country explores the conflicts in the life of a young unemployed black musician
John Ashbery's radical collection The Tennis Court Oath includes poems composed of sliced up fragments
Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, setting poems by Wilfred Owen, is first performed in the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral
The Reivers, the last of William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels, is published just a month before his death
British author Doris Lessing publishes an influential feminist novel, The Golden Notebook
British author P.D. James's first novel, Cover Her Face, introduces her poet detective Adam Dalgleish
US dramatist Edward Albee's play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opens on Broadway
