1969 in literature

Events

• The first Booker Prize is awarded;

• Penelope Ashe[?], author of bestselling novel, Naked Came the Stranger[?] is found to be several people who each took a turn writing a chapter of what they described as "junk" in order to prove that sex-filled trash sells. It did.

New Books

• The Andromeda Strain - Michael Crichton
• The Edible Woman[?] - Margaret Atwood
• The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles
• The Godfather - Mario Puzo
• The Green Man[?] - Kingsley Amis
• The Inheritors[?] - Harold Robbins
• Jirel of Joiry[?] - C. L. Moore
• Little Painted Mouths[?] - Manuel Puig[?]
• The Love Machine[?] - Jacqueline Susann[?]
• Mary Queen of Scots - Antonia Fraser
• Naked Came the Stranger[?] - Penelope Ashe[?]
• Nothing Black But A Cadillac[?] - Raymond Spence[?]
• A Pocketful of Rye[?] - A.J. Cronin
• Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth
• Retour à Roissy[?] - Pauline Réage
• Sounder - William H. Armstrong[?]
• The Seven Minutes[?] - Irving Wallace[?]
• The Street[?] - Mordecai Richler
• That Godless Woman[?] - Merton H. Coleman[?]
• The Veiled Sultan[?] - March Cost[?]

Births

Deaths

• March 26 - John Kennedy Toole, author
• March 27 - B. Traven[?], writer
• October 21 - Jack Kerouac, author
• January 11 - Richmal Crompton, author

Awards

• Booker Prize: P. H. Newby[?] - Something to Answer For
• Newberry Medal for children's literature: Lloyd Alexander, The High King
• Nobel Prize for Literature: Samuel Beckett
• Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Howard Sackler[?], The Great White Hope
• Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: N. Scott Momaday[?] - House Made of Dawn
• Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: George Oppen[?]: Of Being Numerous