A Compendium of Births,
Deaths, Publications, Awards, and Other Events in Mississippi’s Literary
History
Note: In most cases, timeline entries are added
as articles on individual authors are added to this web site. The hyperlinks
listed below connect to biographical and critical articles about that
author. Articles on individual writers will continue to be added in the
coming months. If an author’s name does not appear on this timeline or
if it appears but is not a hyperlink, the article for that author has
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Premiere of the films Sweet Bird of Youth and Period of Adjustment,
based on works by Tennessee
Williams.
William
Faulkner receives his second Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Reivers
and a Gold Medal for Fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
Walker Percy
receives the National Book Award for fiction for his novel The Moviegoer.
September 30:
As James Meredith becomes the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi, riots begin on campus in which two people were killed and many others injured.
National Guard troops are quickly committed and President Kennedy orders 20,000 federal troops to the area.
July 6:William Faulkner dies of a
heart attack in Byhalia, Mississippi. He is buried July 7 in St.
Peter's Cemetery in Oxford.
1963
Publications:
Black Cloud, White Cloud: Two Novellas and Two Stories, by Ellen
Douglas (Houghton).
My Brother Bill: An Affectionate Reminiscence, by John
Faulkner (Trident Press).
The Civil War: A Narrative. Vol. 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian, history
by Shelby Foote
(Random House).
January 16:Tennessee
Williams play The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore
opens on Broadway. It closes after 69 performances.
January 6:Stark Young
died in New York. He was buried in Friendship Cemetery in Como, Mississippi.
March 28:John Faulkner
died in Oxford, Mississippi and was buried in St. Peters Cemetery in Oxford.
Because of disagreement over the spelling of his name, it is spelled Falkner
on one side of the stone, Faulkner on the other, and Fa(u)lkner
on the flat stone topping his grave.
June 12: Civil rights activist Medgar
Evers was shot and killed by an assassins bullet in front of his
home in Jackson, Mississippi. The accused assassin, white supremacist Byron
de La Beckwith, is tried twice over the next few years but each trial ends in
mistrial as the all-white juries could not reach a verdict. He would finally
be convicted for the crime more than 30 years after Evers death.
1964
Publications:
Upton and the Army , by Stephen
E. Ambrose (Louisiana State University Press)
Faulkner at West Point, interviewsby William
Faulkner, edited by Joseph L. Fant and Robert Ashley (Random House).
Three Novels: Follow Me, Down, Jordan County, Love in a Dry Season,
fiction by Shelby
Foote (Dial Press).
The Protectors: The Heroic Story of the Narcotics Agents, Citizens and Officials
in Their Unending, Unsung Battles against Organized Crime in America and Abroad,
by "J. Dennis Gregory" [John
Alfred Williams] (Farrar, Straus).
The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, a play by Tennessee
Williams (New Directions).
The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, a play by Tennessee
Williams (New Directions).
The Shoe Bird, a juvenile book by Eudora
Welty (Harcourt).
Premiere of the film Night of the Iguana, based on the play by Tennessee Williams.
August: During the height of "Freedom Summer," a massive voter registration
and education effort for blacks, three civil rights workers Andrew Goodman,
James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner disappear near Philadelphia, Mississippi.
After a massive investigation by the FBI and other federal agencies, their bodies
are found forty days after their disappearance in an earthen dam in Neshoba
County. A Neshoba County deputy sheriff and six other defendant are later found
guilty in federal court for violating the civil rights of Goodman, Chaney, and
Schwerner.
Where the Dreams Cross, by Ellen
Douglas (Houghton).
Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner 1926-1962, by
William Faulkner, edited by
James B. Meriwether and Michael Millgate (Random House).
New Orleans Sketches, by William
Faulkner, edited by Carvel Collins (Random House).
Pascagoula: Singing River City,
by Jay Higginbotham
(Gill Press).
Mobile: City by the Bay,
by Jay Higginbotham
(Azalea City Printers).
Coming of Age in
Mississippi,
autobiography by Anne Moody (Dial
Press).
The Cube, teleplay by Jim Henson
(broadcast by NBC-TV).
The Journal of Sauvole: Historical
Journal of the Establishment of the French in Louisiana, translated and
edited by Jay Higginbotham
(Colonial Books).
Fort Maurepas: The Birth of Louisiana,
by Jay Higginbotham
(Colonial Books).
In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, a play by Tennessee
Williams (Dramatists Play Service).
A Sweet Devouring, nonfiction by Eudora
Welty (Albondocani Press).
Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light: A Novel of Some Probability, a
novel by John Alfred Williams
(Little, Brown).
Tennessee Williams's play In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel produced on Broady.
Premiere of the film The Reivers, based on the novel by William Faulkner.
Premiere of the film Last of the Mobile Hot Shots, based on the play The Seven Descents of Myrtle by Tennessee Williams.