Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers have one of their greatest successes dancing in their fourth film together, Top Hat

Frank Lloyd directs Charles Laughton and Clark Gable in a dramatic account of the famous mutiny on the Bounty

George Balanchine's new company, American Ballet, has its first brief season in New York

In Frontier the Japanese-US sculptor Isamu Noguchi designs the first of his many sets for Martha Graham ballets

Frank Lloyd Wright designs Fallingwater in Mill Run, Pennsylvania, for Edgar Kaufmann

US athlete Jesse Owens sets three world records and equals a fourth within the space of less than an hour in Ann Arbor, Michigan

Tortilla Flat brings success for the US novelist John Steinbeck

In A Night at the Opera the Marx Brothers make the first of their films as the famous threesome, Groucho, Harpo and Chico

George Gallup founds the American Institute of Public Opinion and becomes the pioneer of modern polling techniques

US seismologist Charles Richter devises a scale for measuring the magnitude of earthquakes

The mighty Boulder Dam (renamed Hoover Dam in 1947) is completed on the Colorado River

US industrialist Howard Hughes sets a new speed record of 352 mph, flying a plane designed by himself

George Gershwin's 'folk opera' Porgy and Bess, based on the novel by DuBose Heyward, opens on Broadway

US jazz pianist William ('count') Basie acquires his own orchestra

The new sound of jazz clarinetist Benny Goodman's touring band brings him the title 'King of Swing'

In Modern Times, the last film featuring the little tramp, Charlie Chaplin sets his character in a mechanistic, impersonal world

Frank Lloyd Wright experiments with prefabrication for low-cost housing in a style he calls Usonian (meaning 'in the US style')

US composer Aaron Copland writes El Salón México, using popular Mexican tunes

US author Margaret Mitchell publishes her one book, which becomes probably the best-selling novel of all time – Gone with the Wind

Paul Robeson sings 'Ol' Man River' in the film of Jerome Kern's Showboat

William Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom! chronicles the violently destructive rise and fall of a poor Southern white, Thomas Sutpen

French-born US author Anaïs Nin publishes her first novel, The House of Incest

US publisher Henry Luce launches a new picture magazine, calling it simply Life

F.D. Roosevelt is elected for a second US presidential term with an increased share of the vote

Joe Louis, 'The Brown Bomber', defeats James J. Braddock to become world heavyweight champion