Tennessee Williams' play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opens on Broadway

Jazz trumpeter Miles Davis forms his own quintet, extending it in 1958 to a sextet

The first Disneyland opens in California, an event watched on television by 90 million Americans

James Dean is type-cast as the young lead in Rebel without a Cause

Arthur Miller's play A View from the Bridge is performed in New York

Baptist pastor Martin Luther King leads the Montgomery Bus Boycott after Rosa Parks is arrested for not giving up her seat to a white man

Heartbreak Hotel, Presley's first recording for RCA, goes to the top of all three US charts

Jerome Robbins creates the ballet The Concert, to music by Chopin

The musical My Fair Lady, by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, opens on Broadway

The first true synthesizer is put on the market by RCA Victor

The husband-and-wife team Charles and Ray Eames design a much copied lounge chair and footstool, made of moulded plywood with padded leather cushions

Eugene O'Neill's searing account of tensions within his own family, Long Day's Journey into Night, has its premiere in Stockholm

Lawrence Ferlinghetti is prosecuted and acquitted for publishing Allen Ginsberg's Howl

Dwight D. Eisenhower is elected for a second US presidential term, again with Richard Nixon as his vice-president

US novelist John Cheever publishes The Wapshot Chronicle, depicting a wealthy and eccentric family in Massachusetts

US novelist Mary McCarthy describes the religious pressures she grew up with in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

Jack Kerouac publishes a largely autobiographical novel, On the Road, describing his experiences travelling through the US and Mexico

In Syntactic Structures Noam Chomsky proposes the revolutionary theory that humans inherit an innate universal grammar

US paratroops enforce desegregation in Little Rock, the capital of Arkansas

The success of the USSR in launching Sputnik prompts the establishment of NASA in the USA

Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins and Stephen Sondheim create the Broadway musical West Side Story

In The Affluent Society US economist John Kenneth Galbraith criticizes wasteful modern consumerism

Paul Newman stars in the film version of Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Truman Capote publishes a short novel, Breakfast at Tiffany's, with a bewitching central character, Holly Golightly

Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson complete a skyscraper for Seagram in New York