istoryworld
American Literature timeline
US author James Baldwin publishes his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, set in Harlem
Arthur Miller's play The Crucible uses the Salem witch trials as a metaphor for the contemporary paranoia of McCarthyism
Tennessee Williams' play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opens on Broadway
Arthur Miller's play A View from the Bridge is performed in New York
Eugene O'Neill's searing account of tensions within his own family, Long Day's Journey into Night, has its premiere in Stockholm
Lawrence Ferlinghetti is prosecuted and acquitted for publishing Allen Ginsberg's Howl
US novelist John Cheever publishes The Wapshot Chronicle, depicting a wealthy and eccentric family in Massachusetts
US novelist Mary McCarthy describes the religious pressures she grew up with in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
Jack Kerouac publishes a largely autobiographical novel, On the Road, describing his experiences travelling through the US and Mexico
In Syntactic Structures Noam Chomsky proposes the revolutionary theory that humans inherit an innate universal grammar
In The Affluent Society US economist John Kenneth Galbraith criticizes wasteful modern consumerism
Truman Capote publishes a short novel, Breakfast at Tiffany's, with a bewitching central character, Holly Golightly
Saul Bellow publishes Henderson the Rain King, in which an American millionaire acquires a strange role in an African tribe
US author William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, an account of the horrors of a junkie's life, is published in Paris
Philip Roth publishes his first book, Goodbye, Columbus, a novella and five short stories
The Colossus is US author Sylvia Plath's first collection of poems
Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail is the first of many collections of poems by US poet Charles Bukowski
US author Harper Lee publishes her first and only novel, To Kill a Mockingbird
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
Political activist Jane Jacobs publishes an influential polemic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
J.D. Salinger publishes Franny and Zooey, the second of his collections of stories about the Glass family
US author Joseph Heller publishes his first novel, Catch-22, set in the last months of World War II
The novelist Ernest Hemingway kills himself with a shotgun in his log cabin in Idaho
James Baldwin's third novel Another Country explores the conflicts in the life of a young unemployed black musician
