1963 in literature

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.
• January 2 – The Traverse Theatre opens in Edinburgh.
• 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.
• 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.
• March/April – The Bologna Children's Book Fair is inaugurated.
• March 19 – Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop premières the ensemble musical Oh, What a Lovely War! at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, London.
• May 17 – The first Galician Literature Day is held.
• 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.
• August 20 – The Royal Shakespeare Company introduces its performance cycle of Shakespeare's history plays under the title The Wars of the Roses, adapted and directed by John Barton and Peter Hall at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon.
• September – Publication in India of Bhalchandra Nemade's Bildungsroman, Kosala ('Cocoon'), considered the first existentialist novel in Marathi literature, written in the author's native village.
• October 21 – The first film from Merchant Ivory Productions is released: The Householder with a screenplay adapted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala from her own novel.
• October 22 – The Royal National Theatre Company is newly formed in the U.K. under Artistic Director Laurence Olivier. Its first performance is with Peter O'Toole as Hamlet, in London.
• 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.
• November 17 – Fictional hero 8 Man, created by science fiction writer Kazumasa Hirai and manga artist Jiro Kuwata, appears in print for the first time.
• November 20–29 – A High Court case in London over the rights in Ian Fleming's James Bond novel Thunderball (1961) determines that future editions will be described as "based on a screen treatment by Kevin McClory, Jack Whittingham, and Ian Fleming".
• unknown dates
• 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, and prosecution of a London retailer.
• Leslie Charteris publishes his last collection of stories with Simon Templar: The Saint in the Sun. All subsequent Saint books will be ghost-written by others.
• Grace Ogot's short story "A Year of Sacrifice" (later retitled "The Rains Came") is published in Black Orpheus.

New books

Fiction

• J. G. Ballard
• The Four-Dimensional Nightmare
• Passport to Eternity
• Simone de Beauvoir – Force of Circumstance (La Force des choses)
• Thomas Bernhard – Frost
• John Bingham – A Case of Libel
• Heinrich Böll – The Clown (Ansichten eines Clowns)
• Pierre Boulle – Planet of the Apes (La Planète des Singes)
• Pearl S. Buck – The Living Reed
• Anthony Burgess – Inside Mr. Enderby
• Dino Buzzati – A Love Affair
• Taylor Caldwell – Grandmother and the Priests
• Morley Callaghan – That Summer in Paris
• Victor Canning – The Limbo Line
• John Dickson Carr – The Men Who Explained Miracles
• Agatha Christie – The Clocks
• Julio Cortázar – Hopscotch (Rayuela)
• Oskar Davičo
• Ćutnje (Silences)
• Gladi (Hungers)
• L. Sprague de Camp – A Gun for Dinosaur and Other Imaginative Tales
• L. Sprague de Camp (as editor) – Swords and Sorcery
• Cecil Day-Lewis – The Deadly Joker
• Len Deighton – Horse Under Water
• August Derleth (as Stephen Grendon) – Mr. George and Other Odd Persons
• Joan Didion – Run, River
• J.P. Donleavy – A Singular Man
• Daphne du Maurier – The Glass-Blowers
• Nell Dunn – Up the Junction
• John Fowles – The Collector
• Ian Fleming
• On Her Majesty's Secret Service
• Thrilling Cities
• Jane Gaskell – The Serpent
• Natalia Ginzburg – Family Sayings
• Rumer Godden – The Battle of the Villa Fiorita
• Winston Graham – The Grove of Eagles
• Günter Grass – Dog Years (Hundejahre)
• Georgette Heyer – False Colours
• Ismail Kadare – The General of the Dead Army (Gjenerali i Ushtrisë së vdekur)
• James Kennaway
• The Bells of Shoreditch
• The Mindbenders
• Damon Knight – '
• Arthur La Bern – Brighton Belle
• John le Carré – The Spy who Came in from the Cold
• J. M. G. Le Clézio – Le Procès-Verbal (The Interrogation)
• Primo Levi – La tregua (The Truce, Reawakening)
• Liu Yichang – Jiutu (酒徒, The Drunkard, or The Alcoholic)
• Mary McCarthy – The Group
• John McGahern – The Barracks
• Richard McKenna – The Sand Pebbles
• Alistair MacLean – Ice Station Zebra
• James A. Michener – Caravans
• Spike Milligan – Puckoon
• Yukio Mishima (三島 由紀夫) – The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (午後の曳航, The Afternoon Towing)
• Gladys Mitchell – Adders on the Heath
• Emily Cheney Neville – It's Like This, Cat
• John O'Hara – Elizabeth Appleton
• Marcel Pagnol
• The Water of the Hills (L'Eau des collines)
• Jean de Florette
• Manon des Sources
• Živojin Pavlović – Krivudava reka (Curved River, short stories)
• Sylvia Plath (as Victoria Lucas) – The Bell Jar
• Laurens van der Post – The Seed and the Sower
• Thomas Pynchon – V.
• John Rechy – City of Night
• Susan Sontag – Benefactor
• Muriel Spark – The Girls of Slender Means
• Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake) – The Man With the Getaway Face
• Rex Stout – The Mother Hunt
• Erwin Strittmatter – Ole Bienkopp
• Boris and Arkady Strugatsky – Dalyokaya Raduga
• Walter Tevis – The Man Who Fell to Earth
• Jim Thompson – The Grifters
• Rosemary Tonks – Opium Fogs
• Mario Vargas Llosa – The Time of the Hero (La ciudad y los perros)
• Jack Vance – The Dragon Masters
• Tarjei Vesaas – Is-slottet (The Ice Palace)
• Kurt Vonnegut – Cat's Cradle
• Keith Waterhouse – Billy Liar
• Charles Webb – The Graduate
• David Weiss – Naked Came I
• Manly Wade Wellman – Who Fears the Devil?
• Morris West – The Shoes of the Fisherman
• Christa Wolf – Der geteilte Himmel (Divided Heaven, They Divided the Sky)

• Nelson Algren – Who Lost an American? (travel book)
• Hannah Arendt
• Eichmann in Jerusalem
• On Revolution
• James Baldwin – The Fire Next Time
• Thomas B. Costain – William the Conqueror
• L. Sprague de Camp – The Ancient Engineers
• Milovan Đilas – Montenegro
• Richard P. Feynman – Six Easy Pieces
• Robert Newton Flew (died 1962) – Jesus and His Way. A study of the ethics of the New Testament
• Shelby Foote – – Vol. 2: Fredicksburg to Meridian
• Betty Friedan – The Feminine Mystique
• W. L. Guttsman – The British Political Elite
• Jules Henry – Culture Against Man
• Richard Hofstadter – Anti-intellectualism in American Life
• C. L. R. James – Beyond a Boundary
• Martin Luther King Jr. – Letter from Birmingham Jail
• H. P. Lovecraft – '
• William H. McNeill – '
• Jessica Mitford – The American Way of Death
• Margaret Murray – My First Hundred Years (autobiography)
• Iris Origo – The World of San Bernardino
• Stanisław Ossowski – Class Structure in the Social Consciousness (Struktura klasowa w społecznej świadomości, 1957)
• W. G. Runciman – Social Science and Political Theory
• E. P. Thompson – The Making of the English Working Class
• UNESCO – History of Mankind – Vol. 1