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American Literature timeline
Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow conjures up weird events in wartime London
US author Stephen King publishes Carrie, the first of his many best-selling horror novels
US author Erica Jong publishes her first novel, Fear of Flying
US author E.L. Doctorow sets his novel Ragtime in the early years of the 20th century
Black American author Alex Haley traces his family origins in Africa in Roots
US author John Irving has wide success with his novel The World According to Garp
US author Sam Shepard's play True West has its premiere in New York
Little Shop of Horrors, by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, opens in New York
US poet Robert Pinsky publishes an acclaimed verse translation, The Inferno of Dante
US author Don DeLillo publishes a novel of weird disasters, White Noise
Timberlake Wertenbaker bases her play Our Country's Good on Thomas Keneally's novel The Playmaker
US author Toni Morrison publishes her novel Beloved, loosely based on a real incident among freed slaves after the Civil War
US author Tom Wolfe gives a bleak view of contemporary New York in his novel The Bonfire of the Vanities
M. Butterfly, by US author and composer David Henry Hwang, uses Puccini's opera as its inspiration
US author Jane Smiley retells the Lear story in A Thousand Acres
David Mamet's play Oleanna dramatizes the ambiguities of sexual politics
All the Pretty Horses is the first volume of US author Cormac McCarthy's trilogy set in Mexico
US author A.R. Ammons publishes a book-length poem, Garbage, typed on narrow strips of adding-machine paper
US author Annie Proulx wins major awards with her second novel, The Shipping News
Millennium Approaches, the first part of Tony Kushner's Angels in America, is premiered in London
US poet Philip Levine wins a Pulitzer Prize with his volume of poems Simple Truth
