1962 in literature

This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1962.

Events
January 7 – In an article in The New York Times Book Review, Gore Vidal calls Evelyn Waugh "our time's first satirist".[1] February 17 – Arthur Miller marries photographer Inge Morath. May – Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell are prosecuted and jailed for defacing library books in London. June 30 – The works of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin are denounced by the Roman Catholic Church. July – General Law Amendment Act in South Africa removes freedom of speech from opposition activists and writers. September – Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath separate.[2] Beginning the following month, Plath experiences a great burst of creativity, writing most of the poems on which her reputation will rest in what will be the last few months of her life, including many which will be published in Ariel and Winter Trees. In December she moves to a London flat in a house in which W. B. Yeats had lived as a boy. November – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Russian: Оди́н день Ива́на Дени́совича, Odin den' Ivana Denisovicha), the author's semi-autobiographical account of life in the gulag, is published in Novy Mir in an unprecededented acknowledgement of the Soviet Union's Stalinist past. December – L. Frank Baum's short story "The Tiger's Eye" is published for the first time, nearly six decades after it was written. December 4 – A tape-recorded conversation on science fiction takes place between Kingsley Amis, C. S. Lewis and Brian Aldiss in Lewis's rooms at Cambridge. Lynne Reid Banks goes to live in a kibbutz. George Oppen publishes his first collection of poetry since Discrete Series in 1934, breaking a 28-year silence. He goes on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1969. A parallel text edition of George Bernard Shaw's play Androcles and the Lion is published posthumously by Penguin Books in the U.K. as the first work in the phonetic Shavian alphabet as devised by Ronald Kingsley Read.

New books

 * A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
 * The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
 * Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
 * One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
 * Travels with Charley: In Search of America by John Steinbeck
 * Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
 * The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman
 * Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee
 * The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn

Awards
American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Fiction: William Faulkner Carnegie Medal for children's literature: Pauline Clarke, The Twelve and the Genii Eric Gregory Award: Donald Thomas, James Simmons, Brian Johnson, Jenny Joseph James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: Ronald Hardy, Act of Destruction James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: Meriol Trevor, Newman: The Pillar and the Cloud and Newman: Light in Winter Miles Franklin Award: Thea Astley, The Well Dressed Explorer and George Turner, The Cupboard Under the Stairs Newbery Medal for children's literature: Elizabeth George Speare, The Bronze Bow Newdigate Prize: Stanley Johnson Nobel Prize for Literature: John Steinbeck Premio Nadal: José María Mendiola, Muerte por fusilamiento Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Frank Loesser, Abe Burrows, How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: Edwin O'Connor, The Edge of Sadness Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Alan Dugan, Poems Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry: Christopher Fry