1961 in literature

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The year 1961 in literature involved some significant events and new books.

Events

• February - Sylvia Plath suffers a miscarriage.
• May - Grove Press publishes Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer in the United States 27 years after its original publication in France. The book leads to one of many obscenity trials (Grove Press, Inc., v. Gerstein) that tested American laws on pornography in the 1960s.
• First English production of Bertolt Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
• Michael Halliday publishes his seminal paper on the systemic functional grammar model.
• William Golding resigns his teaching post in the UK to spend a year as writer in residence at Hollins College, Virginia, USA.

New books

• Brian Aldiss - The Primal Urge
• Poul Anderson - Three Hearts and Three Lions
• J. G. Ballard - The Wind From Nowhere
• Pat Boone - 'Twixt Twelve and Twenty
• J. L. Borges - Ficciones (The Garden of Forking Paths and Artifices translated by Anthony Bonner)
• Morley Callaghan - A Passion in Rome
• John Dickson Carr - The Witch of the Low Tide: An Edwardian Melodrama
• Agatha Christie
  • The Pale Horse
  • Double Sin and Other Stories
• A. J. Cronin - The Judas Tree
• Roald Dahl - James and the Giant Peach
• L. Sprague de Camp - The Dragon of the Ishtar Gate
• August Derleth - The Reminiscences of Solar Pons
• Cyprian Ekwensi - Jagua Nana
• Ian Fleming - Thunderball
• Ernest K. Gann - Fate Is the Hunter
• Gabriel García Márquez - No One Writes to the Colonel (El coronel no tiene quien le escriba)
• Winston Graham - Marnie
• Harry Harrison - The Stainless Steel Rat
• Robert A. Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land
• Joseph Heller - Catch-22
• Marlen Haushofer - The Wall
• Patricia Highsmith - This Sweet Sickness
• Richard Hughes -The Fox in the Attic
• Norton Juster - The Phantom Tollbooth
• Margaret Laurence - The Stone Angel
• John le Carré - Call for the Dead
• Stanislaw Lem - Solaris
• H. P. Lovecraft - The Shunned House
• Iris Murdoch - A Severed Head
• V. S. Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas
• R. K. Narayan - The Man-Eater of Malgudi
• Juan Carlos Onetti - El astillero (The Shipyard)
• Walker Percy - The Moviegoer
• Harold Robbins - The Carpetbaggers
• J. D. Salinger - Franny and Zooey
• Leonardo Sciascia - Il giorno della civetta
• Muriel Spark - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
• John Steinbeck - The Winter of Our Discontent
• Irving Stone - The Agony and the Ecstasy
• Rex Stout - The Final Deduction
• Theodore Sturgeon - Some of Your Blood
• Leon Uris - Mila 18
• Rose Valland - Le front de l'art
• Kurt Vonnegut - Mother Night
• H. Russell Wakefield - Strayers from Sheol
• Edward Lewis Wallant - The Pawnbroker
• Evelyn Waugh - Unconditional Surrender
• Morris West - Daughter of Silence
• Richard Yates -Revolutionary Road
• Yevgeny Yevtushenko - Zima Junction

New drama

• Samuel Beckett - Rough for Radio I, Rough for Radio II
• Henry Denker - A Far Country
• Max Frisch - Andorra
• Jean Genet - The Screens
• Heiner Müller - Die Umsiedlerin (The Resettler Woman)
• John Osborne - Luther
• Neil Simon - Come Blow Your Horn
• Tennessee Williams - The Night of the Iguana

Poetry

Main article: 1961 in poetry

• August Derleth editor - Fire and Sleet and Candlelight

Non-fiction

• L. Sprague de Camp
  • The Heroic Age of American Invention
  • Man And Power
• Frantz Fanon - The Wretched of the Earth
• Jane Jacobs - The Death and Life of Great American Cities
• Marshall McLuhan - The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man
• Karl Popper - The Poverty of Historicism
• Bertrand Russell - Has Man a Future?
• Webster's Third New International Dictionary
• Raymond Williams - The Long Revolution
• Peter Wessel Zapffe - Indføring i litterær dramaturgi (Introduction to literary dramaturgy)

Births

• January 11 - Jasper Fforde, fantasy novelist
• January 28 – Arnaldur Indridason, Icelandic writer
• June 9 - Aaron Sorkin, screenwriter, producer, and playwright
• June 23 - David Leavitt, novelist
• July 7 – Eric Jerome Dickey, American writer
• August 20 - Greg Egan, science fiction author
• September 13 - Tom Holt, historical and comic novelist
• November 9 - Jackie Kay, poet and novelist
• November 14 - Jurga Ivanauskaitė, Lithuanian writer (died 2007)
• November 18 - Steven Moffat, TV writer
• November 24 – Arundhati Roy, writer and activist
• December 8 – Ann Coulter, American author
• November 20 - David Mills, journalist and TV writer (died 2010)
• December 23 – Ezzat el Kamhawi, Egyptian novelist and journalist
• December 30 - Douglas Coupland, author

Deaths

• January 10 - Dashiell Hammett, crime writer and screenwriter, 66 (lung cancer)
• January 21 - Blaise Cendrars, Swiss novelist and poet, 73
• January 30 - Dorothy Thompson, influential journalist, 67
• May 26 - William Troy, writer and teacher, 57 (cancer)
• June 2 - George S. Kaufman, dramatist and critic, 71
• July 2 - Ernest Hemingway, novelist, 61 (suicide)
• July 12 - Mazo de la Roche, novelist, 82
• July 17 - Olga Forsh, Russian dramatist, novelist and memoirist, 88
• September 27 - H.D., poet, novelist and memoirist, 75
• October 19 - Mihail Sadoveanu, Romanian novelist, 80
• November 2 - James Thurber, humorist, 66
• December 7 - Roussan Camille, Haitian poet and journalist, 49

Awards

• Carnegie Medal for children's literature: Lucy M. Boston, A Stranger at Green Knowe
• Eric Gregory Award: Adrian Mitchell, Geoffrey Hill
• Formentor Prize: Jorge Luis Borges and Samuel Beckett
• James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: Jennifer Dawson, The Ha-Ha
• James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: M. K. Ashby, Joseph Ashby of Tysoe
• Lorne Pierce Medal: Robertson Davies
• Newbery Medal for children's literature: Scott O'Dell, Island of the Blue Dolphins
• Nobel Prize for literature - Ivo Andric
• Premio Nadal: Juan Antonio Payno, El curso
• Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Tad Mosel, All the Way Home
• Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: Harper Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird
• Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Phyllis McGinley: Times Three: Selected Verse From Three Decades