1961 in literature

The year 1961 in literature involved some significant events and new books.

Events

• First English production of Bertolt Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
• Michael Halliday publishes his seminal paper on the systemic functional grammar model.
• Sylvia Plath suffers a miscarriage.
• William Golding spends a year as writer in residence at Hollins College, Virginia, USA.
• In May, Grove Press publishes Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer in the United States 27 years after its original publication in France. The book leads to one of many obscenity trials (Grove Press, Inc., v. Gerstein) that tested American laws on pornography in the 1960s.

New books

• Brian Aldiss - The Primal Urge
• Poul Anderson - Three Hearts and Three Lions
• J. G. Ballard - The Wind From Nowhere
• Pat Boone - 'Twixt Twelve and Twenty
• J. L. Borges - Ficciones (The Garden of Forking Paths and Artifices translated by Anthony Bonner)
• Morley Callaghan - A Passion in Rome
• John Dickson Carr - The Witch of the Low Tide: An Edwardian Melodrama
• Agatha Christie
  • The Pale Horse
  • Double Sin and Other Stories
• A. J. Cronin - The Judas Tree
• Roald Dahl - James and the Giant Peach
• L. Sprague de Camp - The Dragon of the Ishtar Gate
• August Derleth - The Reminiscences of Solar Pons
• Cyprian Ekwensi - Jagua Nana
• Ian Fleming - Thunderball
• Ernest K. Gann - Fate Is the Hunter
• Gabriel García Márquez - No One Writes to the Colonel (El coronel no tiene quien le escriba)
• Winston Graham - Marnie
• Harry Harrison - The Stainless Steel Rat
• Robert A. Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land
• Joseph Heller - Catch-22
• Marlen Haushofer - The Wall
• Patricia Highsmith - This Sweet Sickness
• Richard Hughes -The Fox in the Attic
• Norton Juster - The Phantom Tollbooth
• Margaret Laurence - The Stone Angel
• John le Carré - Call for the Dead
• H. P. Lovecraft - The Shunned House
• Iris Murdoch - A Severed Head
• V. S. Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas
• R. K. Narayan - The Man-Eater of Malgudi
• Juan Carlos Onetti - El astillero (The Shipyard)
• Walker Percy - The Moviegoer
• Harold Robbins - The Carpetbaggers
• J. D. Salinger - Franny and Zooey
• Leonardo Sciascia - Il giorno della civetta
• Muriel Spark - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
• John Steinbeck - The Winter of Our Discontent
• Irving Stone - The Agony and the Ecstasy
• Rex Stout - The Final Deduction
• Theodore Sturgeon - Some of Your Blood
• Leon Uris - Mila 18
• Rose Valland - Le front de l'art
• Kurt Vonnegut - Mother Night
• H. Russell Wakefield - Strayers from Sheol
• Edward Lewis Wallant - The Pawnbroker
• Morris West - Daughter of Silence
• Richard Yates -Revolutionary Road
• Yevgeny Yevtushenko - Zima Junction

New drama

• Samuel Beckett - Rough for Radio I, Rough for Radio II
• Henry Denker - A Far Country
• Max Frisch - Andorra
• Jean Genet - The Screens
• Heiner Müller - Die Umsiedlerin (The Resettler Woman)
• John Osborne - Luther
• Neil Simon - Come Blow Your Horn
• Tennessee Williams - The Night of the Iguana

Poetry

• August Derleth editor - Fire and Sleet and Candlelight

Non-fiction

• L. Sprague de Camp
  • The Heroic Age of American Invention
  • Man And Power
• Frantz Fanon - The Wretched of the Earth
• Jane Jacobs - The Death and Life of Great American Cities
• Marshall McLuhan - The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man
• Karl Popper - The Poverty of Historicism
• Bertrand Russell - Has Man a Future?
• Webster's Third New International Dictionary
• Raymond Williams - The Long Revolution
• Peter Wessel Zapffe - Indføring i litterær dramaturgi (Introduction to literary dramaturgy)

Births

• January 11 - Jasper Fforde, novelist
• August 20 - Greg Egan, science fiction author
• September 13 - Tom Holt, novelist
• December 30 - Douglas Coupland, author

Deaths

• January 10 - Dashiell Hammett, author
• January 21 - Blaise Cendrars, author
• January 30 - Dorothy Thompson, influential journalist
• June 2 - George S. Kaufman, dramatist and critic
• July 2 - Ernest Hemingway, novelist
• July 12 - Mazo de la Roche, novelist
• September 27 - H.D., poet, novelist and memoirist
• October 19 - Mihail Sadoveanu, Romanian novelist (born 1880)
• November 2 - James Thurber, humorist
• December 7 - Roussan Camille, Haitian poet and journalist (born 1912)

Awards

• Carnegie Medal for children's literature: Lucy M. Boston, A Stranger at Green Knowe
• Eric Gregory Award: Adrian Mitchell, Geoffrey Hill
• Formentor Prize: Jorge Luis Borges and Samuel Beckett
• James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: Jennifer Dawson, The Ha-Ha
• James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: M. K. Ashby, Joseph Ashby of Tysoe
• Lorne Pierce Medal: Robertson Davies
• Newbery Medal for children's literature: Scott O'Dell, Island of the Blue Dolphins
• Nobel Prize for literature - Ivo Andric
• Premio Nadal: Juan Antonio Payno, El curso
• Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Tad Mosel, All the Way Home
• Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: Harper Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird
• Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Phyllis McGinley: Times Three: Selected Verse From Three Decades