Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh star in Gone with the Wind, based on Margaret Mitchell's novel

John Ford directs John Wayne in the film Stagecoach

US crime-writer Raymond Chandler publishes his first novel, The Big Sleep, introducing the hard-boiled detective Philip Marlowe

The US jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker acquires the nickname 'Yardbird', or simply 'Bird'

German-born US physicist Albert Einstein writes to President Roosevelt, warning of the potential of an atomic bomb

George Marshall becomes US Army chief of staff, a post he retains to the end of World War II

American Ballet Theatre, directed by Lucia Chase and Richard Pleasant, begins its first season in New York

Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen design an 'organic chair' for mass production in moulded plywood and aluminium

German novelist Thomas Mann takes US citizenship and in 1941 moves to California

US author Richard Wright publishes Native Son, his semi-autobiographical novel about racial equality

Bob Hope and Bing Crosby star together in Road to Singapore, the first of a long series of 'Road' films

Gene Kelly makes his name on Broadway in the Rodgers and Hart musical Pal Joey

Ernest Hemingway publishes the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, set in the Spanish Civil War

John Ford directs Henry Fonda in the film of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath

Charlie Chaplin ridicules Hitler in The Great Dictator, the first film in which he speaks coherent dialogue

US author Carson McCullers publishes her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

In To the Finland Station Edmund Wilson discusses the development of socialism and revolution, culminating in Lenin and Trotsky

US choreographer Agnes de Mille creates Black Ritual for American Ballet Theatre

President Roosevelt, campaigning for a third term, asssures Americans that he will not send their sons to fight in Europe's war

F.D. Roosevelt wins an unprecedented third US presidential term, albeit it with a considerably reduced share of the vote

Patrick Henry, the first of the US Liberty ships, is soon followed by more than 2700 others, built at record speed

Scott FitzGerald's final and incomplete novel, The Last Tycoon, is published posthumously

Greta Garbo receives terrible reviews for Two Faced Woman, which turns out to be her last film and the beginning of a long retirement

Agee and Evans give a warm personal view of America in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

The US army invests in a significant new vehicle, placing an order for 16,000 jeeps