Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita is published in Paris

Truman Capote publishes a short novel, Breakfast at Tiffany's, with a bewitching central character, Holly Golightly

English author Alan Sillitoe publishes his first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

German novelist Günter Grass has an immediate success with his first novel, The Tin Drum

Saul Bellow publishes Henderson the Rain King, in which an American millionaire acquires a strange role in an African tribe

Keith Waterhouse has a wide success with his second novel, Billy Liar

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

Irish author Edna O'Brien publishes her first novel, The Country Girls

US author Harper Lee publishes her first and only novel, To Kill a Mockingbird

US author John Updike begins to chart the fictional progress of Harry Angstrom, known as Rabbit, in Rabbit, Run

Penguin Books are prosecuted for obscenity for publishing D.H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, and are acquitted

J.D. Salinger publishes Franny and Zooey, the second of his collections of stories about the Glass family

British author Roald Dahl publishes a novel for children, James and the Giant Peach

Caribbean novelist V.S. Naipaul features his Trinidad family in A House for Mr Biswas

US author Joseph Heller publishes his first novel, Catch-22, set in the last months of World War II

British novelist Muriel Spark publishes The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, set in an Edinburgh school in the 1930s

The Reivers, the last of William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels, is published just a month before his death

British author Doris Lessing publishes an influential feminist novel, The Golden Notebook

British author P.D. James's first novel, Cover Her Face, introduces her poet detective Adam Dalgleish

In Pale Fire Vladimir Nabokov tells his story through an editor's annotations to a poem

Anthony Burgess publishes A Clockwork Orange, a novel depicting a disturbing and violent near-future

US poet Sylvia Plath publishes under a pseudonym her only novel, The Bell Jar

English author John Le Carré publishes a Cold-War thriller The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

Mary McCarthy's novel The Group follows the subsequent adventures of eight fellow graduates from Vassar