The novelist Ernest Hemingway kills himself with a shotgun in his log cabin in Idaho

Andy Warhol creates a stir when his paintings of Campbell's soup cans are exhibited at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles

US singer Bob Dylan writes one of his best-known songs, Blowin' in the Wind (included in his 1963 album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan)

James Baldwin's third novel Another Country explores the conflicts in the life of a young unemployed black musician

Sam Walton opens the first Wal-Mart Discount store, in Rogers, Arkansas

John Ashbery's radical collection The Tennis Court Oath includes poems composed of sliced up fragments

The Reivers, the last of William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels, is published just a month before his death

Students for a Democratic Society publish in Michigan The Port Huron Statement, a seminal text of the New Left

Bette Davis and Joan Crawford star in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane

US golfer Jack Nicklaus turns professional and in the same year wins the first of four US Open titles

Marilyn Monroe dies in Los Angeles from an overdose of sleeping pills

US dramatist Edward Albee's play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opens on Broadway

Finnish-born US architect Eero Saarinen completes his TWA terminal for New York's Kennedy airport

In Pale Fire Vladimir Nabokov tells his story through an editor's annotations to a poem

US poet Sylvia Plath publishes under a pseudonym her only novel, The Bell Jar

Mary McCarthy's novel The Group follows the subsequent adventures of eight fellow graduates from Vassar

US environmentist Rachel Carson publishes Silent Spring, an impassioned warning of ecological disaster

US author and illustrator Maurice Sendak publishes a fantasy for young children, Where the Wild Things Are

In The Feminine Mystique US feminist Betty Friedan challenges the stereotypical view of woman's role

A massive civil rights march in Washington 'for Jobs and Freedom' wins the support of President Kennedy

'I have a dream' says Martin Luther King to 200,000 civil rights demonstrators in Washington

Andy Warhol moves into films with Sleep, showing a man asleep for six hours

President Kennedy is shot in a motorcade driving through downtown Dallas, in Texas

On the death of John F. Kennedy, Vice-president Lyndon Johnson succeeds him as president of the USA

Chief suspect Lee Harvey Oswald is shot by night-club owner Jack Ruby just two days after the assassination of President Kennedy