June 10 – The English novelist Anthony Burgess delivers an inflammatory lecture, "Obscenity and the Arts", at the University of Malta; its reception leads to him leaving Malta.[3] He has begun a novel that will become Earthly Powers (1980).
The novel Deliverance by the American poet James Dickey is published; it will go on to be named among the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century by an editorial board of the American Modern Library.[7]
An unexpurgated edition of John Cleland's Fanny Hill (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, 1748–1749) appears in the U.K. without legal challenge.[8]
Bohumil Hrabal's books Domácí úkoly (Home Work) and Poupata (Buds) are suppressed by the communist authorities in Czechoslovakia.