istoryworld
American Literature timeline
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
The Reivers, the last of William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels, is published just a month before his death
US dramatist Edward Albee's play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opens on Broadway
In Pale Fire Vladimir Nabokov tells his story through an editor's annotations to a poem
US poet Sylvia Plath publishes under a pseudonym her only novel, The Bell Jar
Mary McCarthy's novel The Group follows the subsequent adventures of eight fellow graduates from Vassar
US environmentist Rachel Carson publishes Silent Spring, an impassioned warning of ecological disaster
US author and illustrator Maurice Sendak publishes a fantasy for young children, Where the Wild Things Are
In The Feminine Mystique US feminist Betty Friedan challenges the stereotypical view of woman's role
US poet John Berryman's 77 Dream Songs introduce Henry, his alter ego
Robert Lowell's For the Union Dead takes its title from the last poem, about modern disregard for a Civil War monument
US author Joyce Carol Oates publishes her first novel, With Shuddering Fall
US author Saul Bellow publishes Herzog, a novel featuring a professor of history who is a compulsive sender of messages
Neil Simon's play The Odd Couple is produced in New York
US author Randall Jarrell's poem The Lost World provides the title for his last published book
Based on interviews given to Alex Haley in 1964, a life of Malcolm X is published soon after his assassination
US author Susan Sontag publishes her first collection of essays, Against Interpretation
US poet Anne Sexton publishes Live or Die, a collection containing a poem to her dead friend Sylvia Plath
US author William Styron's novel The Confessions of Nat Turner describes a historical slave revolt in 1831
Norman Mailer publishes The Armies of the Night, based on his experiences on an anti-Vietnam demonstration in Washington in October 1967
Gore Vidal publishes Myra Breckenridge, featuring a lively transsexual as the central character
US novelist Philip Roth publishes Portnoy's Complaint, a monologue in which the hero gives his psychoanalyst a frank description of his sexual frustrations
Space-traveller Billy Pilgrim suffers horrors in Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five
US author Maya Angelou publishes her autobiographical first novel, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
