US author Richard Wright publishes Native Son, his semi-autobiographical novel about racial equality

Ernest Hemingway publishes the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, set in the Spanish Civil War

Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman is rejected by numerous publishers before becoming, decades later, his best-known novel

US author Carson McCullers publishes her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Scott FitzGerald's final and incomplete novel, The Last Tycoon, is published posthumously

US author Eudora Welty publishes her first collection of stories, A Curtain of Green

French author Albert Camus creates an early anti-hero in his novel The Outsider (L'Étranger)

French author Marguerite Duras makes her name with her partly autobiographical novel The Sea Wall

English children's author Enid Blyton introduces the Famous Five in Five on a Treasure Island

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

Jorge Luis Borges publishes Fictions, a collection of short stories

English author Nancy Mitford has her first success with the novel The Pursuit of Love

Evelyn Waugh publishes Brideshead Revisited, a novel about a rich Catholic family in England between the wars

In George Orwell's fable Animal Farm a ruthless pig, Napoleon, controls the farmyard using the techniques of Stalin

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

Titus Groan begins British author Mervyn Peake's trilogy of gothic novels

English author and alcoholic Malcolm Lowry publishes an autobiographical novel, Under the Volcano

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

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

George Orwell publishes Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel set in a terrifying totalitarian state of the future, watched over by Big Brother

The Family Moskat, about a Jewish family in Warsaw, is the first of Isaac Bashevis Singer's books to be published in English

C.S. Lewis gives the first glimpse of Narnia in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

British author Doris Lessing publishes her first novel, The Grass is Singing

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

British author John Wyndham creates a dark fantasy in his novel The Day of the Triffids