Popular films
included
A Foreign Affair directed by Billy
Wilder starring Marlene Dietrich
Joan of Arc starring Ingrid
Bergman
Hamlet starring Lawrence
Olivier
Key Largo
starring Humphrey Bogart and
Lauren Bacall
Red River starring John
Wayne
The Red Shoes
directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
The Treasure
of
Sierra Madre directed by
John Huston starring Humphrey Bogart.
Fiction included: Pearl Puck’s Peony, Erkstine Caldwell’s
This Very Earth, Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms,
Willa Cather’s The Old Beauty and Others, James Gould Cozzens’s
Guard
of Honor, John Dos Passos’s The Grand Design, William
Faulkner’s
Intruder in the Dust, Marth Gelhorn’s Wine of Astonishment,
Zora Neale Hurston’s seraph on the Suwanee, Norman Mailer’s The
Naked and the Dead, Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, Carl
Sandburg’s
Remembrance Rock, Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions, Upton
Sinclair’s
One Clear Call, Elizabeth Spencer’s Fire in the Morning,
Gore
Vidal’s City and the Pillar and Thornton Wilder’s The Ides
of March.
Popular songs included: “Am I Asking Too Much?” by Dinah
Washington, “Black Coffee” by Sarah Vaughan, “The Deck of Cards” by Tex
Ritter,
“Faraway Places” by Bing Crosby and the Ken Darby Choir, “Gloria” by
the Mills Brothers, “Honky Tonkin’” by Hank Williams, “The Huckle Buck”
by Frank Sinatra, and “Manana” by Peggy Lee
The
Baskin-Robbins chain of ice-cream shops began.
Architect Eleanor Raymond completed the Sun House where she used
plywood, paneling and prefabrication.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s first tall buildings, the Promontory
Apartments, were completed in Chicago.
July 9: A Nevada
court declared
prostitution legal in Reno.
Fall: Christian Dior announced the opening
of his U.S. branch design house.
August 10: “Candid
Camera” debuted
on ABC.
August 15: The first nightly news
broadcast with Douglas Edwards premiered but attracted no sponsors.
September: designer Adrian opened
the Adrian Room at New York’s Gunthers.
September 13: Margaret Chase Smith
of Maine became the first woman to be elected to the U.S. Senate.
September 21: Milton
Berle was
televised headlining the first Texaco Star Theater.
October 6: The Museum of Modern Art
purchased its first work by William de Kooning (Painting).
October 25: The Supreme Court upheld
a New York obscenity ban on Edmund Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County.
November 4: T.S. Eliot was awarded
the Nobel Prize for literature.