1961 in literature

Events

January 24 – American dramatist Arthur Miller and film star Marilyn Monroe are granted a divorce in Mexico, on the grounds of "incompatibility".

February – Sylvia Plath suffers a miscarriage. Several of her poems, including "Parliament Hill Fields", address this event.

March 15 – Hugh Wheeler's comedy Big Fish, Little Fish opens at the ANTA Theatre in New York City. Directed by Sir John Gielgud, it is one of the first Broadway plays to explore frankly the issue of male homosexuality.

March 20 – Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, becomes the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and its company the Royal Shakespeare Company (Peter Hall (director)).

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 test American laws on pornography in the 1960s.

September 14 – Novelist William Golding, having resigned his post at Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury, sets off from England to spend the academic year 1961/62 teaching at Hollins College, Virginia, USA.

November 10 – Joseph Heller's satirical novel Catch-22, is first put on sale by Simon & Schuster in the United States, after favorable advance reviews in October. Heller has been working on the book, based on his experiences as a bombardier during World War II, since 1953; its title, which becomes a phrase to refer to a no-win situation, had previously been Catch-18.

Richard Booth opens a second-hand bookshop in Hay-on-Wye on the English border with Wales.

First English production of Bertolt Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui.

British bookseller WHSmith closes the last of its in-store circulating library branches.

Michael Halliday publishes his seminal paper on the systemic functional grammar model.

Fiction

Brian Aldiss – The Primal Urge

Poul Anderson – Three Hearts and Three Lions

J. G. Ballard – The Wind From Nowhere

James Barlow – Term of Trial

Pat Boone – 'Twixt Twelve and Twenty

Jorge Luis 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

Jean Cau – The Mercy of God

Agatha Christie

Double Sin and Other Stories

The Pale Horse

A. J. Cronin – The Judas Tree

Jennifer Dawson – The Ha-Ha

L. Sprague de Camp – The Dragon of the Ishtar Gate

August Derleth – The Reminiscences of Solar Pons

Cyprian Ekwensi – Jagua Nana

Ian Fleming – Thunderball (based on screen treatment by Kevin McClory, Jack Whittingham and the author)

Ernest K. Gann – Fate Is the Hunter

Gabriel García Márquez – No One Writes to the Colonel (El coronel no tiene quien le escriba)

Martyn Goff – The Youngest Director

Edward Gorey – The Curious Sofa. A Pornographic Tale by Ogdred Weary

Winston Graham – Marnie

Vasily Grossman – Everything Flows (Все течет; first published 1989)

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

Jun'ichirō Tanizaki (谷崎 潤一郎) – The Diary of a Mad Old Man (瘋癲老人日記)

Margaret Laurence – The Stone Angel

John le Carré – Call for the Dead

Stanisław 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

Caradog Prichard – Un Nos Ola Leuad (One Moonlit Night)

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

Jun'ichirō Tanizaki (谷崎 潤一郎) – Futen Rojin Nikki (瘋癲老人日記, Diary of a Mad Old Man)

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

Angus Wilson – The Old Men at the Zoo

Richard Yates – Revolutionary Road

Children and young people

Roald Dahl – James and the Giant Peach

L. Sprague de Camp – non-fiction

The Heroic Age of American Invention

Man and Power: The Story of Power from the Pyramids to the Atomic Age

Barbara C. Freeman – Two-Thumb Tom

Rumer Godden – Miss Happiness and Miss Flower

René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo – Asterix the Gaul (Astérix le Gaulois)

Maria Gripe – Josephine

Norton Juster – The Phantom Tollbooth

Kin Platt – The Blue Man

Wilson Rawls – Where the Red Fern Grows

George Selden – The Cricket in Times Square (first in an unnamed sequence of seven books)

Dr. Seuss – The Sneetches and Other Stories

Elizabeth George Speare – The Bronze Bow

Tomi Ungerer – The Three Robbers

Bill Peet – Huge Harold

Drama

John Barton – The Hollow Crown (anthology)

Samuel Beckett

Happy Days

Rough for Radio I

Rough for Radio II

Emilio Carballido – Un pequeño día de ira

Spiro Çomora – Karnavalet e Korçës ("Carnival at Korçë")

Henry Denker – A Far Country

Max Frisch – Andorra

Jean Genet – The Screens (Les Paravents)

Girish Karnad – Yayati

Heiner Müller – Die Umsiedlerin ("The Resettler Woman")

John Osborne – Luther

Neil Simon – Come Blow Your Horn

John Whiting – The Devils

Tennessee Williams – The Night of the Iguana

Poetry

August Derleth editor – Fire and Sleet and Candlelight

Non-fiction

Frantz Fanon – The Wretched of the Earth

Fritz Fischer – Griff nach der Weltmacht: Die Kriegzielpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschland 1914–1918

Jane Jacobs – The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Richard Foster Jones – Ancients and Moderns: A Study of the Rise of the Scientific Movement in Seventeenth Century England (likely year of publication)

Marshall McLuhan – The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man

Louis Nizer – My Life in Court

Karl Popper – The Poverty of Historicism

Maxime Rodinson – Muhammad

Bertrand Russell – Has Man a Future?

Colin Turnbull – The Forest People

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, English fantasy novelist

January 12 – Simon Russell Beale, Malaysian-born English actor

January 28 – Arnaldur Indridason, Icelandic writer

May 17 – Han Dong, Chinese poet and novelist

May 19 – Jennifer Armstrong, American children's author

June 9 – Aaron Sorkin, American screenwriter, producer and playwright

June 23 – David Leavitt, American novelist

June 24 – Rebecca Solnit, American writer and essayist

July 7 – Eric Jerome Dickey, American writer

August 20 – Greg Egan, Australian science fiction author

September 13 – Tom Holt, English historical and comic novelist and poet

September 26 – Will Self, English novelist, political commentator and broadcaster

November 9 – Jackie Kay, Scottish poet and novelist

November 14 – Jurga Ivanauskaitė, Lithuanian writer (died 2007)

November 18 – Steven Moffat, Scottish TV writer

November 24 – Arundhati Roy, Indian writer and activist

November – Sarah Holland, English novelist, actress and singer

December 8 – Ann Coulter, American author

November 20 – David Mills, American journalist and TV writer (died 2010)

December 23 – Ezzat el Kamhawi, Egyptian novelist and journalist

December 30 – Douglas Coupland, Canadian author

Unknown dates

Carol Anne Davis, Scottish crime writer

Richard Flanagan, Australian novelist

Winsome Pinnock, black British playwright

Deaths

January 10 – Dashiell Hammett, American crime writer and screenwriter (lung cancer, born 1894)

January 21 – Blaise Cendrars (Frédéric-Louis Sauser), Swiss novelist and poet (born 1887)

January 30 – Dorothy Thompson, American journalist (born 1893)

March 18 – E. Arnot Robertson, English novelist (born 1903)

April 9 – Oliver Onions (George Oliver), English novelist and ghost story writer (born 1873)

April 22 – Joanna Cannan, English pony book writer and detective novelist (born 1896)

May 26 – William Troy, American writer and teacher (cancer, born 1903)

June 2 – George S. Kaufman, American dramatist and critic (born 1889)

July 1 – Louis-Ferdinand Céline, French novelist and pamphleteer (born 1894)

July 2 – Ernest Hemingway, American novelist (suicide, born 1899)

July 12 – Mazo de la Roche, Canadian novelist (born 1879)

July 17 – Olga Forsh, Russian dramatist, novelist and memoirist (born 1873)

September 27 – H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), American poet, novelist and memoirist (born 1886)

October 19 – Mihail Sadoveanu, Romanian novelist (born 1880)

November 2 – James Thurber, American humorist (born 1894)

December 7 – Roussan Camille, Haitian poet and journalist (born 1912)

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

Miles Franklin Award: Patrick White, Riders in the Chariot

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