See also: 1962 in literature, other events of 1963, 1964 in literature, list of years in literature.

Events

• First United States printing of John Cleland's 1749 novel, Fanny Hill (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure). The book is banned for obscenity, triggering a court case by its publisher.

New books

• The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
• Benefactor - Susan Sontag
• Caravans - James A. Michener
• Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut
• City of Night - John Rechy
• The Collector - John Fowles
• Elizabeth Appleton - John O'Hara
• False Colours – Georgette Heyer
• John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure - John Cleland
• The Glass-Blowers - Daphne Du Maurier
• Gradmother and the Priests - Taylor Caldwell
• The Group - Mary McCarthy
• Happiness Is a Warm Puppy - Charles M. Schulz
• The Making of the English Working Class - E. P. Thompson
• On Her Majesty's Secret Service - Ian Fleming
• Planet of the Apes (La Planète des Singes) - Pierre Boulle
• The Rise of the West - William H. McNeill
• The Sand Pebbles - Richard McKenna
• Second Skin - John Hawkes
• The Shoes of the Fisherman - Morris West
• Six Easy Pieces - Richard P. Feynman
• The Spy who Came in from the Cold - John le Carré
• That Summer in Paris - Morley Callaghan

Births

• June 25 - Yann Martel, author
• Alice Sebold, author

Deaths

• January 29 - Robert Frost, poet
• February 11 - Sylvia Plath, poet/novelist.
• March 4 - William Carlos Williams, writer
• August 27 - W. E. B. Du Bois, writer/civil rights
• November 22 - Aldous Huxley, novelist
• November 22 - C.S. Lewis - novelist, Christian apologist, and English professor
• Theodore Roethke - American poet

Awards

• Newbery Medal for children's literature: Madeline L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
• Nobel Prize for literature - Giorgos Seferis
• Pulitzer Prize for Drama: no award given
• Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: William Faulkner - The Reivers
• Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: William Carlos Williams: Pictures from Breughel