Stephen V. Benét publishes a verse narrative of the Civil War under the title John Brown's Body

The Front Page, by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, has its premiere on Broadway

US anthropologist Margaret Mead makes much of trouble-free sex among natives, in Coming of Age in Samoa, but her findings are subsequently disputed

Republican candidate Herbert Hoover wins the US presidential election with the slogan 'a chicken in every pot'

Sartoris is the first of 14 novels by William Faulkner set in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County

On St Valentine's Day six members of the Bugs Moran gang in Chicago are lined up against a wall and machine-gunned by rival gangsters

Hollywood stars Joan Crawford and Douglas Fairbanks Jr marry

Ernest Hemingway publishes A Farewell to Arms, closely reflecting his own wartime experiences

US astronomer Edwin Hubble uses the red shift of light from galaxies to demonstrate that they are receding from each other and the universe is expanding

Jazz musician Fats Waller begins recording with his Buddies, one of the first racially integrated groups in the US music industry

Baseball star Ty Cobb retires with a career record of 2245 runs, that will remain unbeaten into the twenty-first century

The Marx Brothers (now Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo) make their Hollywood debut with The Cocoanuts

Panic selling on Thursday October 24 triggers a Wall Street stock market crash and a spate of suicides

US author Thomas Wolfe publishes an autobiographical first novel, Look Homeward, Angel

US author Marc Connelly's play Green Pastures has its premiere on Broadway

The Hays Code sets exacting standards of public decency in US movies

18-year-old Jean Harlow is a sensation in Hell's Angels, directed by Howard Hughes

The Chrysler Building opens in New York as the world's tallest skyscraper, but holds the record for only one year

US crime-writer Dashiell Hammett publishes The Maltese Falcon, the novel in which he introduces his sardonic private eye, Sam Spade

The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act introduces a US protectionist policy

US golfer Bobby Jones retires after winning his thirteenth major in eight years

The verdict on Fred Astaire's first screen test, so the legend goes, is that he can't act, can't sing, is balding but can dance a little

Lewis Milestone makes a powerful film of Erich Maria Remarque's anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front, published in the previous year

Edward G. Robinson gives a chilling portrayal of a gangster loosely based on Al Capone in the film Little Caesar

'Garbo talks' and breaks box office records in her first sound film, Anna Christie, directed by Clarence Brown