US state department official Alger Hiss is sentenced to a five-year prison sentence, after being convicted of perjury in a second trial

In response to the Soviet atom bomb, President Truman announces a crash programme to develop a hydrogen bomb

A witch hunt begins when Senator Joseph McCarthy says he knows the names of 205 Communists in the US State Department

US evangelist Billy Graham forms the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, to take the Christian message to the world

US sociologist David Riesman analyzes the American character in The Lonely Crowd

Julius Rosenberg is arrested on suspicion of being a Soviet spy, and his wife Ethel is arrested a few weeks later

Erwin Müller completes his development of the field ion microscope, the first instrument capable of observing atoms

US boxer Sugar Ray Robinson beats Jake Lamotta to take the middleweight title (for the first of five times)

The Twenty-Second Amendment to the US Constitution prevents anyone being elected for more than two presidential terms

Elia Kazan directs Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando in the film of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire

Gertrude Lawrence and Yul Brynner open on Broadway in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I

Catcher in the Rye is US author J.D. Salinger's immensely successful first novel

US novelist Carson McCullers publishes a collection of stories, The Ballad of the Sad Café

John Huston directs Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn in The African Queen, based on a C.S. Forester story

The first hydrogen bomb is successfully tested by the US at Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands

George Gey uses cancer cells from Henrietta Lacks to propagate the first human immortal cell line to succeed in vitro, cells which survive still in laboratories all over the world

US boxer Rocky Marciano becomes world heavyweight champion, defeating 'Jersey Joe' Walcott

US author Ralph Ellison publishes his first novel, Invisible Man, a Kafkaesque account of a black immigrant's life in New York

Gene Kelly dances a famous routine with an umbrella in the film Singin' in the Rain

Ernest Hemingway publishes The Old Man and the Sea, about an epic struggle between an aged Cuban fisherman and a gigantic marlin

Grace Kelly has her first starring role in High Noon, with Gary Cooper

In his novel East of Eden John Steinbeck develops the biblical theme of Cain and Abel in a family saga set in California

US clergyman Norman Vincent Peale has a best-seller in The Power of Positive Thinking

US composer John Cage's 4'33" consists of precisely that number of minutes and seconds of silence

Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower wins the US presidential election with Richard Nixon as his vice-president