In I, Claudius the autobiography of the Roman emperor is ghost-written by Robert Graves

In A Handful of Dust Evelyn Waugh sends his hero Tony Last to a disastrous fate, far away in the Amazon rain forest

Tortilla Flat brings success for the US novelist John Steinbeck

Elias Canetti publishes the novel later translated into English as Auto da Fé

Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges publishes A Universal History of Infamy, one of the first examples of magic realism

R.K. Narayan's novel Swami and Friends is the first set in his fictional town of Malgudi

US author Margaret Mitchell publishes her one book, which becomes probably the best-selling novel of all time – Gone with the Wind

William Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom! chronicles the violently destructive rise and fall of a poor Southern white, Thomas Sutpen

French-born US author Anaïs Nin publishes her first novel, The House of Incest

John Steinbeck publishes Of Mice and Men, a novel about two itinerant farm labourers in California

Danish author Karen Blixen publishes her autobiographical novel Out of Africa

C.S. Forester's central character, Horatio Hornblower, features for the first time – in The Happy Return

British author Evelyn Waugh publishes a classic Fleet Street novel, Scoop, introducing Lord Copper, proprietor of The Beast

French writer Jean-Paul Sartre succeeds with his first novel, La Nausée ('Nausea')

British author Graham Greene publishes Brighton Rock, a novel following 17-year-old Pinkie in the criminal underworld of the seaside town

Maxim de Winter's house, Manderley, holds dark secrets in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca

Irish author Samuel Beckett publishes his first novel, Murphy

James Joyce's Finnegans Wake is published after 17 years in the making

US author Henry Miller publishes in Paris Tropic of Capricorn, about his adolescence in New York

James Thurber publishes his short story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath follows the Joad family, sharecroppers who are forced to move west to escape the horrors of the Dust Bowl

Irish author Flann O'Brien publishes his first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds

Australian author Patrick White publishes his first novel, Happy Valley

British author Christopher Isherwood publishes his novel Goodbye to Berlin, based on his own experiences in the city

US crime-writer Raymond Chandler publishes his first novel, The Big Sleep, introducing the hard-boiled detective Philip Marlowe