1964 in literature

Events

January 10 – Federico García Lorca's play The House of Bernarda Alba, completed just before his assassination in 1936, receives its first performance in Spain.

January 12 – Royal Shakespeare Company Experimental Group open a 4-week Theatre of Cruelty season at the LAMDA Theatre Club, London.

January 23 – Arthur Miller's play After the Fall opens at the ANTA Washington Square Theatre Off-Broadway in New York, directed by Elia Kazan and starring Jason Robards and Kazan's wife Barbara Loden. A semi-autobiographical work, it arouses controversy over Miller's portrayal of late ex-wife Marilyn Monroe.

February 11 – R. v. Gold (Mayflower Books intervening): A London retailer is found guilty under section 3 of the Obscene Publications Act 1959 of stocking a 1963 edition of John Cleland's novel Fanny Hill (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, 1748-9).

April 23 – Shakespeare Birthplace Trust opens the Shakespeare Centre, housing its library and research facilities, in Stratford-upon-Avon (England).

April 29 – Peter Weiss's play with music Die Verfolgung und Ermordung Jean Paul Marats dargestellt durch die Schauspielgruppe des Hospizes zu Charenton unter Anleitung des Herrn de Sade ("The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade", known as Marat/Sade) premieres at the Schiller Theater in West Berlin. In August it receives its English-language premiere by the Royal Shakespeare Company in London at the Aldwych Theatre.

May – Michael Moorcock becomes editor of the science fiction magazine New Worlds.

May 6 – Joe Orton's black comedy Entertaining Mr Sloane premieres at the New Arts Theatre in London with Dudley Sutton in the title rôle.

May 29 – Le Théâtre du Soleil is established as a collective avant-garde stage ensemble by Ariane Mnouchkine, Philippe Léotard and fellow students of L'École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris, going on to present its first show, Les Petits Bourgeois (adapted from Maxim Gorky's Мещане), at Théâtre Mouffetard.

June 22 – Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer is allowed to circulate legally in the United States by the U.S. Supreme Court three decades after its original publication in France, after the U.S. Supreme Court, in Grove Press, Inc. v. Gerstein, cites Jacobellis v. Ohio (which is decided the same day) and overrules state court findings that the book is obscene.

August 11 – Ian Fleming walks to the Royal St George's Golf Club in Canterbury, Kent, for lunch and later dines at his hotel with friends, collapsing shortly afterwards with a heart attack. His last recorded words are an apology to the ambulance drivers for having inconvenienced them, saying "I am sorry to trouble you chaps. I don't know how you get along so fast with the traffic on the roads these days." Fleming dies next day.

September – Everyman Theatre opens in Liverpool, England.

September 28 – Brian Friel's play Philadelphia, Here I Come! is premièred at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin.

October 28 – The Wednesday Play debuts on BBC1 television in the United Kingdom, presenting original one-off contemporary social drama, mostly written for television.

Jean-Paul Sartre becomes head of the Organization to Defend Iranian Political Prisoners (ODIPP).

W. H. Auden describes his "Vision of Agape" (June 1933) in his preface to the anthology The Protestant Mystics.

Fiction

Chinua Achebe – Arrow of God

José Agustín – La Tumba

Lloyd Alexander – The Book of Three

Poul Anderson – Time and Stars

Louis Auchincloss – The Rector of Justin

J. G. Ballard – The Terminal Beach

Simone de Beauvoir – A Very Easy Death (Une Mort très douce)

Saul Bellow – Herzog

Thomas Berger – Little Big Man

Leigh Brackett

People of the Talisman

The Secret of Sinharat

Ray Bradbury – The Machineries of Joy

John Braine – The Jealous God

Richard Brautigan – A Confederate General From Big Sur

John Brunner

To Conquer Chaos

The Whole Man

Edgar Rice Burroughs – Tarzan and the Madman

William S. Burroughs - Nova Express

J. Ramsey Campbell – The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants

John Dickson Carr – Most Secret

Agatha Christie – A Caribbean Mystery

Louis-Ferdinand Céline – London Bridge: Guignol's Band II

A. J. Cronin – A Song of Sixpence

Len Deighton – Funeral in Berlin

August Derleth (editor) – Over the Edge

Michel Droit – Le Retour

Ralph Ellison – Shadow and Act

Ian Fleming – You Only Live Twice

Max Frisch – Gantenbein

William Golding – The Spire

Bohumil Hrabal – Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age (Taneční hodiny pro starší a pokročilé)

Carl Jacobi – Portraits in Moonlight

B. S. Johnson – Albert Angelo

Ken Kesey – Sometimes a Great Notion

Richard E. Kim – The Martyred

Etienne Leroux – Een vir Azazel (One for Azazel, translated as One for the Devil)

Liang Yusheng (梁羽生) – Datang Youxia Zhuan (大唐游俠傳)

H. P. Lovecraft – At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels

John D. MacDonald

The Deep Blue Good-by

A Purple Place For Dying

The Quick Red Fox

Iris Murdoch – The Italian Girl

Sterling North – Rascal

Vladimir Nabokov – The Defense

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (also known as James Ngigi) – Weep Not, Child

Kenzaburō Ōe (大江 健三郎) – A Personal Matter (個人的な体験; Kojinteki na taiken)

Anthony Powell – The Valley of Bones

Mario Puzo – Fortunate Pilgrim

Ellery Queen – And On the Eighth Day

Jean Ray – Saint-Judas-de-la-nuit

Ruth Rendell – From Doon With Death

Karl Ristikivi – Imede saar

Hubert Selby Jr. – Last Exit to Brooklyn

Ryōtarō Shiba (司馬 遼太郎) – Moeyo Ken (燃えよ剣, Burn, O Sword)

Clark Ashton Smith – Tales of Science and Sorcery

Wilbur Smith – When the Lion Feeds

Rex Stout

Trio for Blunt Instruments

A Right to Die

Leon Uris – Armageddon

Jack Vance

The Houses of Iszm

The Killing Machine

Star King

Gore Vidal – Julian

Irving Wallace – The Man

Raymond Williams – Second Generation

Maia Wojciechowska – Shadow of a Bull

Children and young people

Nina Bawden – On the Run (also Three on the Run)

Christianna Brand – Nurse Matilda

Hesba Fay Brismead – Pastures of the Blue Crane

Jeff Brown – Flat Stanley

Roald Dahl – Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Louise Fitzhugh – Harriet the Spy

Ian Fleming – Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang: The Magical Car

Rumer Godden – Home is the Sailor

Irene Hunt – Across Five Aprils

Ervin Lázár – A kisfiú meg az oroszlánok (The Little Boy and the Lions)

Rhoda Levine – Harrison Loved His Umbrella

Ruth Manning-Sanders – A Book of Dwarfs

J. P. Martin – Uncle (first in a series of six books)

Jean Merrill – The Pushcart War

Ruth Park – The Muddle-Headed Wombat on Holiday

Shel Silverstein – The Giving Tree

Miriam Young – Miss Suzy

Bill Peet - Ella

Bill Peet - Randy's Dandy Lions

Drama

Ama Ata Aidoo – The Dilemma of a Ghost

David Campton – Dead and Alive

Brian Friel – Philadelphia Here I Come!

Arthur Miller

After the Fall

Incident At Vichy

Joe Orton – Entertaining Mr Sloane

Peter Weiss – Marat/Sade

Poetry

Joseph Payne Brennan – Nightmare Need

Leonard Cohen – Flowers for Hitler

Mehr Lal Soni Zia Fatehabadi – Husn-e-Ghazal (The beauty of Ghazal)

Philip Larkin – The Whitsun Weddings

Oodgeroo Noonuccal – We are Going: Poems

Ion Vinea – Ora fântânilor (The Hour of Fountains)

Donald Wandrei – Poems for Midnight

Up The Line To Death: The War Poets 1914-1918 (anthology)

Non-fiction

Eric Berne – Games People Play

Allan Bloom with Harry V. Jaffa – Shakespeare's Politics

L. Sprague de Camp

Ancient Ruins and Archaeology (with Catherine Crook de Camp)

Elephant

Hilda Ellis Davidson – Gods and Myths of Northern Europe

Dick Gregory – Nigger: An Autobiography

Ernest Hemingway – A Moveable Feast

Michael Holroyd – Hugh Kingsmill: A Critical Biography

John F. Kennedy (posthumous) – A Nation of Immigrants

Martin Luther King, Jr. – Why We Can't Wait

Jan Kott – Shakespeare, Our Contemporary

Herbert Marcuse – One-Dimensional Man

Marshall McLuhan – Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

Sayyid Qutb – Ma'alim fi al-Tariq (معالم في الطريق, Milestones)

Ayn Rand – The Virtue of Selfishness

The Warren Commission – The Warren Report

Evelyn Waugh – A Little Learning

Births

January 26 – Peter Braunstein, American journalist and playwright

March 7 – Bret Easton Ellis, American novelist, screenwriter and short-story writer

March 21 – Kaori Ekuni (江國 香織), Japanese novelist

June 5 – Rick Riordan, American young-adult author

June 7 – Petr Hruška, Czech poet

June 11 – Dan Chaon, American novelist and short-story writer

July 3 – Joanne Harris, English novelist

July 7 – Karina Galvez, Ecuadorian poet

July 16 – Anne Provoost, Flemish novelist and essayist

September 9 – Aleksandar Hemon, Bosnian novelist and short-story writer

September 19 – Patrick Marber, English comedian, playwright, director, puppeteer, actor and screenwriter

September 25

Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Spanish novelist

Gareth Thompson, English children's author

December 26 – Elizabeth Kostova, American author

Unknown dates

Ge Fei (格非, real name: Liu Yong, 刘勇), Chinese novelist

Mai Jia (real name: Jiǎng Běnhǔ, 蒋本浒), Chinese novelist

Nell Zink, American novelist

Deaths

January 17 – T. H. White, English novelist (heart condition, born 1906)

February 3 – Clarence Irving Lewis, American philosopher (born 1883)

February 25 – Grace Metalious (Marie Grace DeRepentigny), American novelist (cirrhosis of liver, born 1924)

March 17 – Păstorel Teodoreanu, Romanian poet and satirist (lung cancer, born 1894)

March 20 – Brendan Behan, Irish playwright, poet and writer (born 1923)

April 14 – Rachel Carson, American environmentalist (breast cancer, born 1907)

April 18 – Ben Hecht, American screenwriter (born 1894)

May 13 – Hamilton Basso, American novelist and journalist (born 1904)

July 6 – Ion Vinea, Romanian poet, novelist, and journalist (cancer, born 1895)

August 3 – Flannery O'Connor, American essayist and fiction writer (born 1925)

August 12 – Ian Fleming, English spy thriller writer (heart attack, born 1908)

August 17 – Mihai Ralea, Romanian critic and sociologist of literature (born 1896)

September 14 – Vasily Grossman, Soviet novelist (cancer, born 1905)

September 18 – Seán O'Casey, Irish dramatist and memoirist (born 1880)

November 21 – Leah Bodine Drake, American poet, editor and critic (cancer, born 1914)

December 9 – Dame Edith Sitwell, English poet and critic (born 1887)

December 21 – Carl Van Vechten, American writer and photographer (born 1880)

Unknown date – Radu D. Rosetti, Romanian poet and playwright (born 1874)

Awards

Nobel Prize for literature – Jean-Paul Sartre (refused)

Canada

See 1964 Governor General's Awards for a complete list of winners and finalists for those awards.

France

Prix Goncourt: Georges Conchon, L'Etat sauvage

Prix Médicis: Monique Wittig, L’Opoponax

United Kingdom

Carnegie Medal for children's literature: Sheena Porter, Nordy Bank

Eric Gregory Award: Robert Nye, Ken Smith, Jean Symons, Ted Walker

James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: Frank Tuohy, The Ice Saints

James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: Elizabeth Longford, Victoria R.I.

Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry: R. S. Thomas

United States

American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Drama: Lillian Hellman

Hugo Award: Clifford D. Simak, Way Station

Newbery Medal for children's literature: Emily Cheney Neville, It's Like This, Cat

Pulitzer Prize for Drama: no award given

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: no award given

Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Louis Simpson: At The End Of The Open Road

Elsewhere

Miles Franklin Award: George Johnston, My Brother Jack

Premio Nadal: Alfredo Martínez Garrido, El miedo y la esperanza

Viareggio Prize: Giuseppe Berto, Il male oscuro