1963 in literature

See also: 1962 in literature, other events of 1963, 1964 in literature, list of years in literature.

Events

• First United States printing of John Cleland's 1749 novel, Fanny Hill (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure). The book is banned for obscenity, triggering a court case by its publisher.

New books

• The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
• Benefactor – Susan Sontag
• Caravans – James A. Michener
• Cat's Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
• City of Night  – John Rechy
• The Collector – John Fowles
• Elizabeth Appleton  – John O'Hara
• False Colours – Georgette Heyer
• John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure – John Cleland
• The Glass-Blowers  – Daphne Du Maurier
• Gradmother and the Priests  – Taylor Caldwell
• The Group  – Mary McCarthy
• Happiness Is a Warm Puppy  – Charles M. Schulz
• The Making of the English Working Class – E. P. Thompson
• On Her Majesty's Secret Service  – Ian Fleming
• Planet of the Apes (La Planète des Singes)  – Pierre Boulle
• The Rise of the West  – William H. McNeill
• The Sand Pebbles  – Richard McKenna
• Second Skin – John Hawkes
• The Shoes of the Fisherman  – Morris West
• Six Easy Pieces  – Richard P. Feynman
• The Spy who Came in from the Cold  – John le Carré
• That Summer in Paris – Morley Callaghan

Births

• June 25 – Yann Martel, author
• Russell T. Davies, television writer
• Alice Sebold, author

Deaths

• January 8 – Kay Sage, poet
• January 29 – Robert Frost, poet
• February 11 – Sylvia Plath, poet/novelist.
• March 4 – William Carlos Williams, writer
• May 12 – Aiden Wilson Tozer, religious writer
• June 17 – John Cowper Powys, novelist
• August 18 – Clifford Odets, dramatist
• August 27 – W. E. B. Du Bois, writer/civil rights
• September 3 – Louis MacNeice, poet
• November 22 – Aldous Huxley, novelist
• November 22 – C.S. Lewis – novelist, Christian apologist, and English professor
• December 25 – Tristan Tzara, poet and essayist
• Theodore Roethke – American poet

Awards

• Newbery Medal for children's literature: Madeline L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
• Nobel Prize for literature – Giorgos Seferis
• Pulitzer Prize for Drama: no award given
• Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: William Faulkner – The Reivers
• Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: William Carlos Williams: Pictures from Breughel