Thornton Wilder's play The Skin of our Teeth has a mixed reception at its New Haven premiere

Saul Bellow publishes his first novel, Dangling Man, a study of an intellectual adrift as he waits to be drafted into the army

Boston writer Robert Lowell publishes his first book of poems, Land of Unlikeness

US dramatist Tennessee Williams has his first success with The Glass Menagerie

Russian-born novelist Vladimir Nabokov becomes a US citizen

Richard Wright publishes Black Boy, an account of his early life in Mississippi and then Chicago

Eudora Welty sets her novel Delta Wedding in a contemporary southern plantation

Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, set in a down-and-out bar of the kind he had known in his youth, is performed in New York

Robert Lowell's second collection, Lord Weary's Castle, contains 'The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket' and 'Mr Edwards and the Spider'

Ezra Pound, charged with treason for his wartime broadcasts, begins twelve years in a US hospital for the criminally insane

US poet Elizabeth Bishop publishes her first collection of poems, North and South

Marlon Brando stars on Broadway in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar named Desire

Norman Mailer has immediate succes with his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, based on his military service in the Pacific

US poet Theodore Roethke publishes The Lost Son, his second collection

US novelist and poet Jack Kerouac coins a term for his contemporaries, the Beat Generation

Annie Allen, by US author Gwendolyn Brooks, describes in narrative verse the life of a black girl in contemporary USA

Death of a Salesman, by US playwright Arthur Miller, has its first performance in New York

US sociologist David Riesman analyzes the American character in The Lonely Crowd

Catcher in the Rye is US author J.D. Salinger's immensely successful first novel

US novelist Carson McCullers publishes a collection of stories, The Ballad of the Sad Café

US author Ralph Ellison publishes his first novel, Invisible Man, a Kafkaesque account of a black immigrant's life in New York

Ernest Hemingway publishes The Old Man and the Sea, about an epic struggle between an aged Cuban fisherman and a gigantic marlin

In his novel East of Eden John Steinbeck develops the biblical theme of Cain and Abel in a family saga set in California

US clergyman Norman Vincent Peale has a best-seller in The Power of Positive Thinking

Saul Bellow publishes The Adventures of Augie March, a novel about the experiences of a young Chicago Jew