Events relating to literature

US novelist Mary McCarthy describes the religious pressures she grew up with in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

Jack Kerouac publishes a largely autobiographical novel, On the Road, describing his experiences travelling through the US and Mexico

In Voss Australian author Patrick White creates an epic novel about a disastrous attempt to cross the continent

The publication of the novel Justine launches Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet

In Syntactic Structures Noam Chomsky proposes the revolutionary theory that humans inherit an innate universal grammar

Laurence Olivier brings the music-hall artist Archie Rice vibrantly to life in John Osborne's The Entertainer

Boris Pasternak's only novel, Doctor Zhivago, is first published in an Italian translation

In The Affluent Society US economist John Kenneth Galbraith criticizes wasteful modern consumerism

The Fire Raisers, by Swiss dramatist Max Frisch, is performed in Zürich

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

Harold Pinter's first play in London's West End, The Birthday Party, closes in less than a week

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

US author William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, an account of the horrors of a junkie's life, is published in Paris

Harold Pinter's second play in London's West End, The Caretaker, immediately brings him an international reputation

Philip Roth publishes his first book, Goodbye, Columbus, a novella and five short stories

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