1960 in literature

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This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1960.

Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?

– Mervyn Griffith-Jones prosecuting in the Lady Chatterley's Lover case

Events

• February–October – Astounding magazine is renamed Analog.
• Spring – August Derleth launches the poetry magazine, Hawk and Whippoorwill in the United States.
• March 22 – Joan Henry's play Look on Tempests is premièred at the Comedy Theatre in London's West End, the first play dealing openly with homosexuality to be passed for performance by the Lord Chamberlain in Britain.
• April 27 – Harold Pinter's play The Caretaker is premièred at the Arts Theatre Club in London's West End, transferring to the Duchess Theatre the following month, where it runs for 444 performances before departing London for Broadway, Pinter's first significant commercial success. Alan Bates and Donald Pleasence star in the original production.
• July 11 – Harper Lee's Southern Gothic Bildungsroman To Kill a Mockingbird is published in the United States.
• September 5 – Welsh poet Waldo Williams is imprisoned for six weeks for non-payment of income tax (a protest against defence spending).
• October 3 – The Lilly Library is opened on the campus of Indiana University Bloomington, based on the collections of Josiah K. Lilly, Jr.
• October 6 & December 16 – Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten, receives full screenwriting credit for his work on the films Spartacus and Exodus, released in the United States on these dates.
• c. October – Vasily Grossman submits his novel Life and Fate (Жизнь и судьба) for publication, resulting in confiscation of the manuscript and all related material by the KGB in the Soviet Union.
• November – Rita Rait-Kovaleva's Russian translation of The Catcher in the Rye is published in the Soviet literary magazine Inostrannaya Literatura as Над пропастью во ржи ("Over the Abyss in Rye").
• November 2 – R v Penguin Books Ltd: Penguin Books is found not guilty of obscenity for publishing Lady Chatterley's Lover in the United Kingdom.
• November 8 – Richard Wright delivers a polemical lecture, "The Situation of the Black Artist and Intellectual in the United States", to students and members of the American Church in Paris, a few weeks before his death from heart attack aged 52 in the city.
• November 10 – Lady Chatterley's Lover sells 200,000 copies in one day following its publication in the U.K. since being banned in 1928.
• November 17 – Michael Foot is re-elected to the Parliament of the United Kingdom and relinquishes the editorship of Tribune.
• November 19 – American novelist Norman Mailer stabs his wife, the artist Adele Morales.
• November 24 – Raymond Queneau founds Oulipo in France.
• Dutch mathematician Hans Freudenthal invents the artificial language Lincos, intended for communication with extraterrestrial intelligence.

New prose fiction

• Chinua Achebe – No Longer at Ease
• Kingsley Amis – Take a Girl Like You
• Poul Anderson – The High Crusade
• Lynne Reid Banks – The L-Shaped Room
• Stan Barstow – A Kind of Loving
• John Barth – The Sot-Weed Factor
• Hamilton Basso – The Light Infantry Ball
• Augusto Roa Bastos – Hijo de hombre
• Charles Beaumont – Night Ride and Other Journeys
• Robert Bloch – Pleasant Dreams: Nightmares
• Algis Budrys – Rogue Moon
• Anthony Burgess
  • The Doctor is Sick
  • The Right to an Answer
• Dino Buzzati – Larger than Life (Il grande ritratto)
• Morley Callaghan – The Many Colored Coat
• John Dickson Carr – In Spite of Thunder
• Barry Crump – A Good Keen Man
• Roald Dahl – Kiss Kiss (short story collection)
• Philip K. Dick
  • Dr. Futurity
  • Vulcan's Hammer
• E.L. Doctorow – Welcome to Hard Times
• Carlo Cassola – Bébo's Girl (La ragazza di Bube)
• Louis-Ferdinand Céline – North (Nord)
• Agatha Christie – The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding
• Roald Dahl – Kiss Kiss
• L. Sprague de Camp
  • The Bronze God of Rhodes
  • The Glory That Was
• L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt – Wall of Serpents
• Carmen de Icaza - The House Across the Street (La casa de enfrente)
• Lawrence Durrell – Clea, the final volume of The Alexandria Quartet (begun 1957)
• Michael Ende – Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver (Jim Knopf und Lukas der Lokomotivführer)
• Henry Farrell – What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
• Gabriel Fielding – Through Streets Broad and Narrow
• Ian Fleming – For Your Eyes Only (James Bond short story collection)
• Per Anders Fogelström – City of My Dreams (Mina drömmars stad)
• Alan Garner – The Weirdstone of Brisingamen
• Graham Greene – A Burnt-Out Case
• Arthur Hailey – In High Places
• Donald Hamilton – Death of a Citizen
• Hergé – Tintin au Tibet (book publication)
• James Leo Herlihy – All Fall Down
• Vintilă Horia – God Was Born in Exile (Dieu est né en exil)
• Jabra Ibrahim Jabra
  • al-Ḥurrīyah wa-al-Tūfān
  • Hunters in a Narrow Street
• Greye La Spina – Invaders from the Dark
• Hubert Lampo – De komst van Joachim Stiller ("The Coming of Joachim Stiller")
• Jean Lartéguy – Les Centurions
• Harper Lee – To Kill a Mockingbird
• David Lodge – The Picturegoers
• John Masters – The Venus of Konpara
• Richard Matheson – The Beardless Warriors
• Judith Merrill – The Tomorrow People
• Walter M. Miller – A Canticle for Leibowitz
• Nancy Mitford – Don't Tell Alfred
• Alberto Moravia – La noia (The Empty Canvas)
• Edna O'Brien – The Country Girls
• Flannery O'Connor – The Violent Bear It Away
• Scott O'Dell – Island of the Blue Dolphins
• Wilder Penfield – The Torch
• Frederik Pohl – Drunkard's Walk
• Anthony Powell – Casanova's Chinese Restaurant
• James H. Schmitz – Agent of Vega
• Dr. Seuss – Green Eggs and Ham
• Nevil Shute – Trustee from the Toolroom (published posthumously)
• Clark Ashton Smith – The Abominations of Yondo
• Muriel Spark – The Ballad of Peckham Rye
• David Storey – This Sporting Life
• Rex Stout
  • Three at Wolfe's Door
  • Too Many Clients
• William Styron – Set This House on Fire
• John Updike – Rabbit, Run
• Irving Wallace – The Chapman Report
• John Edward Williams – Butcher's Crossing
• Raymond Williams – Border Country
• John Wyndham – Trouble with Lichen

New drama

• Tawfiq al-Hakim – El Sultan El-Ha'er ("The Sultan Perplexed")
• Edward Albee – The Death of Bessie Smith and The Sandbox (both first performed)
• Samuel Beckett – The Old Tune (first broadcast)
• Robert Bolt – A Man for All Seasons (stage version) and The Tiger and the Horse
• Marc Camoletti – Boeing-Boeing
• Noël Coward – Waiting in the Wings
• Beverley Cross – Strip the Willow
• Witold Gombrowicz – The Marriage (Ślub, first performed)
• Eugène Ionesco – Rhinocéros
• Ira Levin – Critic's Choice
• Stephen Lewis and Theatre Workshop – Sparrers Can't Sing
• Bruce Mason – The End of the Golden Weather
• Tad Mosel – All the Way Home
• Harold Pinter – The Caretaker (first performed and published), The Room (first professional performance) and A Night Out (first broadcast)
• Terence Rattigan – Ross
• Barry Reckord – You in Your Small Corner
• Nelson Rodrigues – Beijo no Asfalto ("The Asphalt Kiss")
• Wole Soyinka – A Dance of the Forests
• Gore Vidal – The Best Man
• Maruxa Vilalta – Los disorientados ("The Disoriented Ones")
• Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall – Billy Liar
• Tennessee Williams – Period of Adjustment

Poetry

Main article: 1960 in poetry

• Douglas Livingstone – The Skull in the Mud
• Sylvia Plath – The Colossus and Other Poems
• Alan Sillitoe – The Rats and other poems
• Jan Twardowski – Znaki ufności

Non-fiction

• Joy Adamson – Born Free
• Kingsley Amis – New Maps of Hell
• Philippe Ariès – Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (L'Enfant et la vie familiale sous l'Ancien Régime)
• Peg Bracken – The I Hate to Cook Book
• Albert Camus – Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (selected essays, published posthumously)
• Aimé Césaire – Toussaint Louverture: La Révolution française et le problème colonial
• Jean-Paul Desbiens – Les insolences du Frère Untel ("The Insolences of Brother Anonymous")
• Hans-Georg Gadamer – Truth and Method (Wahrheit und Methode)
• John Howard Griffin – Black Like Me
• Helen Keller – Light in my Darkness
• Arthur Koestler – The Lotus and the Robot
• A. S. Neill – Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing
• Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier – The Morning of the Magicians (Le Matin des magiciens)
• Jean-Paul Sartre – Critique of Dialectical Reason (Critique de la raison dialectique)
• William L. Shirer – The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
• W. T. Stace – The Teachings of the Mystics
• Elie Wiesel – Night (previously published in French in 1958 as La Nuit)

Births

• January 18 – Mark Rylance, English actor and theater director
• January 28 – Robert von Dassanowsky, Austrian-American historian and academic
• February 19 – Helen Fielding, English novelist and screenwriter
• April 28 – Ian Rankin, Scottish crime novelist
• May 21 – John O'Brien, American novelist (died 1994)
• July 13 – Ian Hislop, Welsh-born satirist
• August 4 – Tim Winton, Australian novelist
• October 18 – Hồ Anh Thái, Vietnamese author
• November 10 – Neil Gaiman, English author
• December 10 – Kenneth Branagh, Northern Irish actor and screenwriter
• Unknown dates
  • Malcolm Pryce, Anglo-Welsh detective novelist
  • Alexis Stamatis, Greek novelist, playwright and poet

Deaths

• January 4 – Albert Camus, French Pied-Noir novelist (car accident, born 1913)
• January 9 – Elsie J. Oxenham (Elsie Jeanette Dunkerley), English girls' story writer (born 1880)
• January 12 – Nevil Shute, English-born novelist (stroke, born 1899)
• January 14 – Ralph Chubb, English poet, printer and artist (born 1892)
• January 28 – Zora Neale Hurston, African-American anthropologist and author (born 1891)
• May 30 – Boris Pasternak, Russian novelist, poet and translator (born 1890)
• July 27 – Ethel Lilian Voynich, Anglo-Irish novelist and composer (born 1864)
• August 19 – Frances Cornford, English poet (born 1886)
• August 29 – Vicki Baum, Austrian-born novelist writing in German and English (born 1888)
• November 20 – Ya'akov Cohen, Russian-born Israeli poet (born 1881)
• November 28 – Richard Wright, African-American novelist and poet (born 1908)
• December 26 – Tetsuro Watsuji (和辻 哲郎), Japanese philosopher and historian of ideas (born 1889)

Awards

• American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Criticism: E. B. White
• Carnegie Medal for children's literature: Ian Wolfram Cornwall, The Making of Man
• Eric Gregory Award: Christopher Levenson
• James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: Rex Warner, Imperial Caesar
• James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: Canon Adam Fox, The Life of Dean Inge
• Miles Franklin Award: Elizabeth O'Conner, The Irishman
• Newbery Medal for children's literature: Joseph Krumgold, Onion John
• Nobel Prize for literature: Saint-John Perse
• Premio Nadal: Ramiro Pinilla, Ciegas hormigas
• Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Jerome Weidman, George Abbott for book, Jerry Bock for music, and Sheldon Harnick for lyrics, Fiorello!
• Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: Allen Drury, Advise and Consent
• Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: W. D. Snodgrass, Heart's Needle
• Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry: John Betjeman

In literature

• Ray Bradbury's mystery novel Let's All Kill Constance (2002) is set during this year.
• Smith Hempstone's novel A Tract of Time (1966) is set during the Vietnam War around this time.
• Charles McCarry's spy novel The Secret Lovers (1977) is set during this year.
• Mary McGarry Morris' novel Songs in Ordinary Time (1995) is set during this year.
• Austin Pendleton's play Orson's Shadow (2000) is set in London during this year.
• Dan Simmons' horror novel Summer of Night (1991) is set during this year.
• Jules Verne's novel Paris in the Twentieth Century (Paris au XXe siècle, written in 1863 but not published until 1994) is set during this August.