Mae West stars alongside George Raft in her first film, Night after Night

Ernst Lubitsch has a great success with Trouble in Paradise, a Hollywood comedy about villainy and romance in Paris

US novelist Erskine Caldwell publishes Tobacco Road, about white sharecroppers coping with poverty and desperation in Georgia

A deeply flawed experiment with African American syphilis patients is launched in Tuskegee, Alabama

Young Lonigan: a Boyhood in Chicago Streets is the first novel in James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan trilogy

Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan star as Tarzan and Jane in Tarzan the Ape Man, the first of countless Tarzan talkies

US author Damon Runyon publishes his first collection of stories about low-life New York, under the title Guys and Dolls

The incumbent president, Republican Herbert Hoover, suffers a heavy defeat by Democrat F.D. Roosevelt in the US election

Prohibition is lifted in the USA when the Twenty-First Amendment repeals the Eighteenth, which has been in force for 13 years

President Roosevelt gives the first of his many 'fireside chats' to the US nation on radio

In My Life and Hard Times James Thurber's publishes an affectionate account of his family, including the night the bed fell on his father

Lloyd Bacon directs 42nd Street, a classic backstage movie about putting a musical comedy on Broadway

US actress Katherine Hepburn wins the first of four Oscars in only her second film, Morning Glory

The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is the largest project launched in the first hundred days of Roosevelt's New Deal

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance together for the first time on film, in Flying Down to Rio

Unknown American blues singer Huddie Ledbetter, or Leadbelly, is first recorded singing in the Louisiana State Penitentiary

King Kong, an enduringly successful horror film, is based on a story by Edgar Wallace

Erskine Caldwell publishes a novel, God's Little Acre, about a farmer obsessed with finding gold on his farm

The Marx Brothers make their last film as a foursome, Duck Soup, with Zeppo still in the team

Mae West gives Cary Grant his big break, choosing him as her co-star in She Done Him Wrong

US author Scott FitzGerald publishes his novel Tender Is the Night

Elijah Muhammad takes control of the Nation of Islam, or Black Muslims, and leads the movement for more than 40 years

In Lillian Hellman's play The Children's Hour two teachers are maliciously accused of lesbianism by one of their pupils

6-year-old Shirley Temple wins instant fame after starring in Stand up and Cheer

The US military government is finally withdrawn from Haiti after nineteen years