The Modern Jazz Quartet, led by pianist John Lewis, plays in the sophisticated style that becomes known as 'cool jazz'

Saul Bellow publishes The Adventures of Augie March, a novel about the experiences of a young Chicago Jew

Elia Kazan directs Marlon Brando in the film On the Waterfront

Fred Zinneman directs Burt Lancaster, Deborah Kerr and Frank Sinatra in From Here to Eternity

US architect Louis Kahn makes his reputation with the Yale Art Gallery in New Haven

Black American Malcolm Little, who has joined the Nation of Islam while in prison, adopts the surname X to symbolize his rejection of his slave name

US microbiologist Jonas Salk announces the discovery of an effective vaccine against polio

Alfred Charles Kinsey completes his study of human sexuality with the publication of Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female

US author James Baldwin publishes his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, set in Harlem

US abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning exhibits his series Women nos I-VI, on which he has been working since 1938

William Wyler directs Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday, a beguiling comedy about a princess's romance in Rome

US citizens Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are sent to the electric chair as convicted spies

US golfer Ben Hogan wins the US Open, the US Masters and the British Open in a single year

Within the year Marilyn Monroe stars in Niagara, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire

Arthur Miller's play The Crucible uses the Salem witch trials as a metaphor for the contemporary paranoia of McCarthyism

Merce Cunningham forms his own company of dancers, initially at Black Mountain College in North Carolina

Baseball star Joe Dimaggio marries Marilyn Monroe, but the marriage lasts only a year

Senator McCarthy's Communist witch-hunt is broadcast live for several weeks on US television

J. Robert Oppenheimer, the 'father of the atomic bomb', is investigated for Communist sympathies and his security clearance is withdrawn

The term Domino Theory is coined to reflect President Eisenhower's view of how states might fall to Communism

Bill Haley & His Comets record Rock Around the Clock, providing an early classic of US rock and roll

The US Supreme Court rules in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation in US schools is illegal

George Cukor directs Judy Garland and James Mason in A Star Is Born

US truck driver Elvis Presley makes his first commercial recordings, for Sun Records in Memphis, Tennessee

Elia Kazan directs James Dean in East of Eden