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:
“Turn where we may, within, around, the voice of great events is proclaiming to us, Reform, that you may preserve!”
—Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859)
“By many a legendary tale of violence and wrong, as well as by events which have passed before their eyes, these people have been taught to look upon white men with abhorrence.... I can sympathize with the spirit which prompts the Typee warrior to guard all the passes to his valley with the point of his levelled spear, and, standing upon the beach, with his back turned upon his green home, to hold at bay the intruding European.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“All strange and terrible events are welcome,
But comforts we despise.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)