Events
- January 1 – Cecil Day-Lewis is announced as the new Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom.
- May–June – May 1968: The largest industrial strikes in French history, the shutdown of France's educational, commercial and media institutions, and the severest challenge up to this time to Gaullist political authority. It has long-term reach and global context, including revolts, tudent movements, counter-culture, le gauchisme and its eventual transformation into legend as a way of trying to account for and symbolize developments in radical politics, popular culture, and social change in the late 1960s and beyond.
- August – Tom Wolfe's books The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Pump House Gang are published on the same day. Both go on to become best-sellers and cement Wolfe's status as one of the generation's leading social critics, chroniclers of the counterculture of the 1960s and practitioners of New Journalism.
- Dean R. Koontz's first novel, Star Quest, is published.
- Glidrose Publications releases the James Bond novel, Colonel Sun by "Robert Markham" (a pseudonym for Kingsley Amis). Initially intended as a relaunch of the Bond book series following the death in 1964 of the character's creator, Ian Fleming, Colonel Sun instead ends up being the final book of the series (discounting a "biography" of Bond and a pair of film script adaptations) until John Gardner revives the literary James Bond in 1981.
Read more about this topic: 1968 In Literature
Famous quotes containing the word events:
““The ideal reasoner,” he remarked, “would, when he had once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it but also all the results which would follow from it.””
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)
“The return of the asymmetrical Saturday was one of those small events that were interior, local, almost civic and which, in tranquil lives and closed societies, create a sort of national bond and become the favorite theme of conversation, of jokes and of stories exaggerated with pleasure: it would have been a ready- made seed for a legendary cycle, had any of us leanings toward the epic.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man’s judgement.”
—Francis Bacon (1561–1626)