1966 in literature

Events

February – Boots UK closes the last of its circulating "Booklovers' Library" branches in its pharmacy chain stores.

February 10 – Author Jacqueline Susann has her first novel, Valley of the Dolls, published. From a friend, she obtains a list of the bookstores upon which The New York Times relies for sales figures to determine its bestseller list. She then uses her own money to buy large quantities of the book at these stores resulting in her novel going to #1 on the list. Valley of the Dolls comes to rank among the best selling novels of all time.

February 14 – Dissident writers Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky are sentenced to hard labour for "anti-Soviet activity".

March 9 – J. R. R. Tolkien writes to Roger Verhulst, expressing his concerns about a proposed book about him by W. H. Auden, saying "I regard such things as premature impertinences ... I cannot believe that they have a usefulness to justify the distaste and irritation given to the victim", but adding: "I owe Mr. Auden a debt of gratitude for the generosity with which he has supported and encouraged me since the first appearance of The Lord of the Rings."

March 21 – In the landmark obscenity case of Memoirs v. Massachusetts, the Supreme Court of the United States rules that the hitherto-banned novel Fanny Hill (John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, 1749) does not meet the Roth Standard for obscenity.

June 14 – The Roman Curia abolishes the Index Librorum Prohibitorum after 427 years.

June 16 – Blackwell's open the 930 m² Norrington Room in their main bookshop in Broad Street, Oxford.

June 23 – Publication of Octopussy and the Living Daylights, the final collection of James Bond short stories by the character's creator, Ian Fleming, who had died in 1964.

July 24 – Poet and critic Frank O'Hara is hit by a dune buggy on Fire Island beach. He dies of his injuries the following day.

August 24 – Tom Stoppard's tragicomedy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead receives its première at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Although it plays to small audiences, Stoppard's reputation is made by a review by Ronald Bryden in The Observer.

September 8 – First UNESCO International Literacy Day celebrated.

September 9 – New Beacon Books, the first Caribbean publishing house in England, produces its first title, Foundations by John La Rose.

October 21 – Jacques Derrida delivers a lecture La Structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines ("Structure, sign, and play in the discourse of the human sciences") to a structuralism colloquium at Johns Hopkins University, bringing his work on literary theory to international prominence.

November 3–4 – 1966 Flood of the Arno River in Florence causes severe damage to the contents of libraries including the National Central Library and Gabinetto Vieusseux.

November 28 – Truman Capote's Black and White Ball ("The Party of the Century") is held in New York City. Guest of honor, Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, later said: "Truman called me up that summer and said, 'I think you need cheering up. And I'm going to give you a ball.'...I was...sort of baffled....I felt a little bit like Truman was going to give the ball anyway and that I was part of the props."

December – Moskva magazine begins the first publication of Mihail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita (Ма́стер и Маргари́та, begun in 1928 but left incomplete on the author's death in 1940), in two parts with portions omitted or altered.

First modern revival of a play by Bhāsa, Madhyamavyayoga, directed by Shanta Gandhi in a Hindi translation.

Fiction

Chinua Achebe – A Man of the People

Robert H. Adleman (with Col. George Walton) – The Devil's Brigade

Lloyd Alexander – The Castle of Llyr

Elechi Amadi – The Concubine

Kingsley Amis – The Anti-Death League

Isaac Asimov – Fantastic Voyage

Margaret Atwood

The Circle Game

Expeditions

Speeches for Doctor Frankenstein

Louis Auchincloss – The Embezzler

J. G. Ballard

The Crystal World

The Impossible Man

Henry Bauchau – La Déchirure

Paul Bowles – Up Above the World

Ray Bradbury – S is for Space

Truman Capote – In Cold Blood

John Dickson Carr – Panic in Box C

Angela Carter – Shadow Dance

Agatha Christie – Third Girl

James Clavell – Tai-Pan

Robert Crichton – The Secret of Santa Vittoria

August Derleth and Mark Schorer – Colonel Markesan and Less Pleasant People

Philip K. Dick

The Crack in Space

Now Wait for Last Year

The Unteleported Man

Allen Drury – Capable of Honor

Friedrich Dürrenmatt – Der Meteor

Shusaku Endo (遠藤 周作) – Silence (沈黙, Chinmoku)

Ian Fleming – Octopussy and The Living Daylights

John Fowles – The Magus

Robert A. Heinlein – The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

Robert E. Howard and L. Sprague de Camp – Conan the Adventurer

Aidan Higgins – Langrishe, Go Down

Daniel Keyes – Flowers for Algernon

Anatoly Kuznetsov – Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel (Бабий яр. Роман-документ)

J. M. G. Le Clézio – Le Déluge

José Lezama Lima – Paradiso

H. P. Lovecraft and Divers Hands – The Dark Brotherhood and Other Pieces

John D. MacDonald – One Fearful Yellow Eye

Alistair Maclean – When Eight Bells Toll

Larry McMurtry – Last Picture Show

Bernard Malamud – The Fixer

Marga Minco – Een leeg huis ("An empty house")

Grace Ogot – The Promised Land

Anthony Powell – The Soldier's Art

Thomas Pynchon – The Crying of Lot 49

Seabury Quinn – Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder

Jean Rhys – Wide Sargasso Sea

Karl Ristikivi – Rõõmulaul

Giorgio Scerbanenco

A Private Venus

Traitors to All

Leonardo Sciascia – A ciascuno il suo

Paul Scott – The Jewel in the Crown

Adela Rogers St. Johns – Tell No Man

Rex Stout – Death of a Doxy

William Styron – The Confessions of Nat Turner

Jacqueline Susann – Valley of the Dolls

Leslie Thomas – The Virgin Soldiers

Roderick Thorp – The Detective

Jack Vance – The Eyes of the Overworld

Mario Vargas Llosa – The Green House (La Casa Verde)

Patrick White – The Solid Mandala

Roger Zelazny

The Dream Master

This Immortal

Children and young people

Nina Bawden – The Witch's Daughter

Roald Dahl – The Magic Finger

Leon Garfield – Devil-in-the-Fog

Charles Keeping – Charley, Charlotte and the Golden Canary

Clive King – The 22 Letters

Ruth Park

The Muddle-Headed Wombat at School

The Muddle-Headed Wombat in the Snow

Eduard Uspensky – Crocodile Gena and His Friends (Крокодил Гена и его друзья)

Jill Paton Walsh – Hengest's Tale

Bill Peet

Capyboppy

Farewell to Shady Glade

Drama

Edward Albee – A Delicate Balance

Barbara Garson – MacBird

Günter Grass – Die Plebejer proben den Aufstand (The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising)

Gwenlyn Parry – Saer Doliau (Doll Doctor)

Tom Stoppard – Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Zdeněk Svěrák, Jiří Šebánek and Ladislav Smoljak – Akt (The Nude, introducing the Czech fictional character Jára Cimrman)

Luis Valdez – Quinta Temporada

Poetry

Seamus Heaney – Death of a Naturalist

Anne Sexton – Live or Die

Non-fiction

Geoffrey Blainey – The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia's History

Dictionary of Canadian Biography, volume 1.

Truman Capote – In Cold Blood

William Crossing (died 1928) – The Dartmoor Worker (anthology)

L. Sprague de Camp and Catherine Crook de Camp – Spirits, Stars, and Spells

Edward Jay Epstein – Inquest

Margery Fish – An All the Year Garden

Michel Foucault – The Order of Things (Les Mots et les choses: une archéologie des sciences humaines)

Ernst H. Gombrich – Norm and Form. Studies in the Art of the Renaissance

P. J. Kavanagh – The Perfect Stranger

Mark Lane – Rush to Judgment

Alasdair MacIntyre – A Short History of Ethics

Nancy Mitford – The Sun King

María Moliner – Diccionario de uso del español

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. – A Thousand Days

Hunter S. Thompson – Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs

Frances Yates – The Art of Memory

Births

February 24 – Alain Mabanckou, Francophone Congolese novelist

April 12 – Jim Duffy, Irish political writer

April 20 – David Chalmers, Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist

July 4 – Brian Selznick, American children's writer and illustrator

July 21 – Sarah Waters, Welsh novelist

November – Jane Holland (Victoria Lamb, etc.), English poet and novelist

September 24 – Rhys Hughes, Welsh short-story writer

December 29 – Christian Kracht, Swiss novelist and journalist

Unknown date – Helen Zahavi, English novelist and translator

Deaths

January 18 – Kathleen Norris, American novelist (born 1880)

February 12 – Elio Vittorini, Italian novelist, (born 1908)

March 10 – Frank O'Connor, Irish short-story writer, (born 1903)

April 1 – Brian O'Nolan (Flann O'Brien), Irish satirist (heart attack, born 1911)

April 2 – C. S. Forester, English historical novelist (born 1899)

April 10 – Evelyn Waugh, English novelist, biographer and travel writer (heart failure, born 1903)

April 13 – Georges Duhamel, French novelist (born 1884)

June 7 – Jean Arp, Alsatian poet, sculptor and painter (born 1886)

June 10 – Henry Treece, English historical novelist (born 1911)

June 30 – Margery Allingham, English crime novelist (born 1904)

July 20 – Anne Beffort, Luxembourg literary writer and biographer (born 1880)

July 25 – Frank O'Hara, American poet (ruptured liver, born 1926)

August 6 – Cordwainer Smith (Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger), American science fiction author (heart attack, born 1913)

August 12 – Artur Alliksaar, Estonian poet (cancer, born 1923)

September 25 – Mina Loy, English-born poet and artist (born 1882)

September 28 – André Breton, French Surrealist poet and author (born 1896)

October 30 – Yórgos Theotokás, Greek novelist (born 1906)

November 26 – Siegfried Kracauer, German journalist and critic (born 1889)

December 23 – Heimito von Doderer, Austrian author (born 1896)

Unknown date – Dorothy Whipple, English novelist and children's writer (born 1893)

Awards

Cholmondeley Award: Ted Walker, Stevie Smith

Eric Gregory Award: Robin Fulton, Seamus Heaney, Hugo Williams

See 1966 Governor General's Awards for a complete list of winners and finalists for those awards.

Hugo Award: Frank Herbert, Dune and Roger Zelazny, ...And Call Me Conrad

James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: Christine Brooke-Rose, Such, and Aidan Higgins, Langrishe, Go Down

James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: Geoffrey Keynes, The Life of William Harvey

Miles Franklin Award: Peter Mathers, Trap

Nebula Award (first): Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17 and Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

Newbery Medal for children's literature: Elizabeth Borton de Treviño, I, Juan de Pareja

Nobel Prize for literature: Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Nelly Sachs

Premio Nadal: Vicente Soto, La zancada

Prix Goncourt: Edmonde Charles-Roux, Oublier Palerme

Prix Médicis: Marie-Claire Blais, Une saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel

Pulitzer Prize for Drama: no award given

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: Katherine Anne Porter, Collected Stories

Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Richard Eberhart, Selected Poems

Viareggio Prize: Alfonso Gatto, La storia delle vittime