This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1963.
Events
January – Novy Mir publishes "Matryona's Home", the first of three more stories by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn critical of the Soviet regime. They will be the last of his works to be published in the Soviet Union until 1990.[1]
February – English novelist Barbara Pym submits her seventh book, An Unsuitable Attachment, for publication. It is rejected by Tom Maschler at her regular publisher, Jonathan Cape, and by others. She will not have another novel published until 1977 and An Unsuitable Attachment does not appear until 1982, posthumously.[3]
February 11 – American-born poet Sylvia Plath (age 30) commits suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning in her London flat about a month after her only novel, the semi-autobiographical The Bell Jar, appears and six days after writing her last poem, "Edge".
March – The Publications and Entertainments Act in South Africa enables the government to impose strict censorship. Des Troye's novel An Act of Immorality (an attack on miscegenation provisions in the country's Immorality Act) is among the first to be prohibited.
July 16 – A day after admission to the Acland Hospital in Oxford, C. S. Lewis suffers a heart attack. Though later discharged, he dies at home four months later.[4]
November – Tom Wolfe's essay "There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored (Thphhhhhh!) Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (Rahghhh!) Around the Bend (Brummmmmmmmmmmmmmm)..." is published in Esquire magazine in the United States.
Russian poet Anna Akhmatova's Requiem, an elegy on Soviet sufferings in the Great Purge, composed 1935–1961, is first published complete in book form, without her knowledge, in Munich.
The first modern publication by mainstream publishers in the U.K. and the United States of John Cleland's novel Fanny Hill (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, 1748–1749) causes it to be banned for obscenity in Massachusetts, triggering a court case by its publisher,[8] and prosecution of a London retailer.
^John Wakeman, Stanley Kunitz, World Authors, 1950-1970: A Companion Volume to Twentieth Century Authors Wilson (publisher), 1975, page 619
^Williams, Herbert (1997). John Cowper Powys. Bridgend, Wales, Chester Springs, PA: Seren U.S. distributor, Dufour Editions. p. 156. ISBN9781854111968.
^Brennan, Elizabeth (1999). Who's who of Pulitzer Prize winners. Phoenix, Ariz: Oryx Press. p. 523. ISBN9781573561112.
^Demastes, William (1995). American playwrights, 1880-1945: a research and production sourcebook. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press. p. 311. ISBN9780313286384.