James Bond, agent 007, has a licence to kill in Ian Fleming's first novel, Casino Royale

US author James Baldwin publishes his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, set in Harlem

South African author Nadine Gordimer publishes her first novel, The Lying Days

Arthur Miller's play The Crucible uses the Salem witch trials as a metaphor for the contemporary paranoia of McCarthyism

Dylan Thomas's 'play for voices', Under Milk Wood, is broadcast on BBC radio, with Richard Burton as narrator

Politician and author Winston Churchill completes his six-volume history The Second World War

Anglo-Irish novelist Iris Murdoch publishes her first novel, Under the Net

19-year-old Françoise Sagan has a major international success with her first novel, Bonjour Tristesse

English author Kingsley Amis's first novel, Lucky Jim, strikes an anti-establishment chord

William Golding gives a chilling account of schoolboy savagery in his first novel, Lord of the Flies

Kingsley Amis and other young writers in Britain become known as Angry Young Men

Tennessee Williams' play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opens on Broadway

Graham Greene's novel The Quiet American is set in contemporary Vietnam and foresees troubles ahead

Thomas Mann publishes a longer but still incomplete version of his novel Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man

English poet Philip Larkin finds his distinctive voice in his collection The Less Deceived

Arthur Miller's play A View from the Bridge is performed in New York

British philologist J.R.R. Tolkien publishes the third and final volume of his epic fantasy The Lord of the Rings

English poet Ted Hughes marries US poet Sylvia Plath

The Visit, by Swiss dramatist Friedrich Dürrenmatt, has its premiere in Zürich

Sicilian author Giuseppe de Lampedusa completes his novel The Leopard, but does not live to see it published

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

John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger features in the first season of London's new English Stage Company

Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima publishes The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

US novelist John Cheever publishes The Wapshot Chronicle, depicting a wealthy and eccentric family in Massachusetts