istoryworld
Events relating to north america
US author Harper Lee publishes her first and only novel, To Kill a Mockingbird
Alfred Hitchcock directs Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins in Psycho
US novelist John Barth publishes The Sot-Weed Factor, a picaresque life of Edmund Cook set on a family tobacco plantation in Maryland
US author John Updike begins to chart the fictional progress of Harry Angstrom, known as Rabbit, in Rabbit, Run
Democrat candidate John F. Kennedy defeats Republican Richard Nixon in the US presidential election
President Kennedy appoints his younger brother Robert to the position of US attorney-general
Political activist Jane Jacobs publishes an influential polemic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
President Kennedy establishes the Peace Corps, enabling US volunteers to work abroad
J.D. Salinger publishes Franny and Zooey, the second of his collections of stories about the Glass family
US astronaut Alan Shepard becomes the first American in space, with a suborbital flight in Freedom 7
Arthur Miller writes the screenplay for The Misfits for his wife, Marilyn Monroe
US author Joseph Heller publishes his first novel, Catch-22, set in the last months of World War II
President Kennedy commits the US to placing a man on the moon and bringing him back safely by 1970
The novelist Ernest Hemingway kills himself with a shotgun in his log cabin in Idaho
Andy Warhol creates a stir when his paintings of Campbell's soup cans are exhibited at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles
US singer Bob Dylan writes one of his best-known songs, Blowin' in the Wind (included in his 1963 album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan)
James Baldwin's third novel Another Country explores the conflicts in the life of a young unemployed black musician
Sam Walton opens the first Wal-Mart Discount store, in Rogers, Arkansas
John Ashbery's radical collection The Tennis Court Oath includes poems composed of sliced up fragments
The Reivers, the last of William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels, is published just a month before his death
Students for a Democratic Society publish in Michigan The Port Huron Statement, a seminal text of the New Left
Bette Davis and Joan Crawford star in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane
US golfer Jack Nicklaus turns professional and in the same year wins the first of four US Open titles
Marilyn Monroe dies in Los Angeles from an overdose of sleeping pills
The Trans-Canada Highway is completed, stretching some 5000 miles across the continent
