1957

1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960

political events

Britain's discredited prime minister (PM) Sir Anthony Eden resigns January 9. (Maurice) Harold Macmillan, 62, of the publishing family heads a new cabinet and will be PM until 1963. He and President Eisenhower meet in the Bermuda Conference from March 21 to 24, reestablishing the relationship strained by last year's Suez crisis. The United States agrees to make certain guided missiles available to Britain.

Soviet, East German, Czech, Bulgarian, and Romanian representatives confer at Budapest in January and issue a pronouncement that Hungary is a dictatorship of the proletariat, that she relies on Moscow and the Soviet bloc in her foreign policy, and that the Soviet garrison in Hungary is to protect Hungarians from imperialist aggression (see 1956).

Former Hungarian dictator Admiral Nikolaus Horthy de Nagybánya dies at Estoril, Portugal, February 9 at age 88; former British diplomat Robert G. Vansittart, Baron Vansittart, at Denham, Buckinghamshire, February 14 at age 75 (his warnings against the Germans before World War II went unheeded, and he has regarded his life as a failure, as his posthumous autobiography will reveal next year); former French premier Edouard Herriot dies at Lyons March 26 at age 84.

West German nuclear physicists announce April 12 that they will not cooperate in producing or testing nuclear weapons, Japan sends Moscow a note April 20 protesting Soviet nuclear tests, and the British explode their first thermonuclear bomb in the megaton range May 15 at Christmas Island in the Pacific (see Geneva Conference, 1958).

The National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) is started by U.S. founders who include psychoanalyst Erich Fromm.

Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy (R. Wis.) dies of cirrhosis of the liver (or hepatitic failure) at Bethesda Naval Hospital May 2 at age 48. Senate Judiciary Committee chairman James O. (Oliver) Eastland, 52, (D. Miss.) becomes the most outspoken congressional critic of alleged communists.

Norway's Haakon VII dies of a respiratory illness at Oslo September 21 at age 85 after a 52-year reign in which he spent the years 1940 to 1945 in England. He is succeeded by his son Olav Alexander Edvard Kristian Frederik, 54, who has served as regent since 1955, when Haakon suffered an accident, and will reign until his death in 1991 as Olaf V. Norway's Labor Party is returned to power October 7.

Former German field marshal Friedrich Paulus dies of a stroke at Dresden February 1 at age 66. Captured by Soviet forces after the surrender of Stalingrad in 1943, he was released from detention in 1953 and became a lecturer on military affairs in East Germany; Bertha Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach of World War I "Big Bertha" cannon fame dies at her home in Essen September 21 at age 71; former Gestapo head Rudolph Diels accidentally shoots himself to death at Katzeneinbogen November 18 at age 56.

East German authorities appoint Berlin-born police inspector Erich Mielke, 49, head of the security agency known as the Stasi. Mielke was involved in the killing of two Berlin policemen in August 1931 during the violence attendant upon the end of the Weimar Republic, escaped to Moscow to avoid arrest, took the name Paul Bach, attended the International Lenin School for 2 years, served with the 14th International Brigade under the name Fritz Leissner during the Spanish Civil War, made his way to France after Franco's victory in 1939, was interned by the Germans in 1940, escaped, worked under false papers as a woodcutter, was caught once again by the Germans and placed in a forced-labor camp, got to the Soviet Zone in May 1945, and as head of the Stasi will use 90,000 agents and 250,000 informers to keep the East Germans in a state of terror until 1989 (see 1992).

Czechoslovakia's president Antonín Zápotocky dies at Prague November 13 at age 72 after 4 years in office.

Former British war minister Sir Leslie Hore-Belisha dies of a cerebral hemorrhage at Rheims, France, February 16 at age 63; former Royal Navy commander Lachlan D. Mackintosh, the Mackintosh of Mackintosh, at Nairn, Scotland, March 20 at age 60; World War I British naval hero and 1909 polar explorer Edward Ratcliffe, Baron Mountevans, at Golaa, Norway, August 20 at age 76.

Premier Bulganin of the USSR and Premier Zhou Enlai of the People's Republic announce January 18 that they will support Mideastern nations against Western aggression.

President Eisenhower begins a second term January 20 by extending the Truman Doctrine of 1947 to the Mideast. The president enunciates the Eisenhower Doctrine for protecting the region from communist aggression; he asks Congress to send economic aid to the Mideast and authorize him to send U.S. armed forces there if necessary. The House of Representatives votes 355 to 61 January 30 to approve the Eisenhower Doctrine.

The U.S. Army adopts the fully-automatic M-14 .30-caliber rifle to replace the heavier M-1 Garand rifle patented in 1934 and in use since 1936 (see M-16, 1967).

Saudi Arabia's king Saud arrives at Washington January 31 to discuss Mideast problems and receives a warm welcome from President Eisenhower. Israel rejects a February 2 UN resolution, introduced by the United States, calling upon her to complete her withdrawal from Egypt's Gaza Strip and other occupied Egyptian territory unless she receives more UN assurance that her own territory will be protected. Washington indicates that economic sanctions will be applied against Israel if the UN requires such action but assures Tel Aviv that it will support "free passage" through the Gulf of Aqaba. Israel announces withdrawal of her troops from the Gaza Strip and the Gulf of Aqaba area March 1 on the "assumption" that the UN Emergency Force will administer the Gaza Strip to prevent its being used for border raids and that navigation in the Gulf of Aqaba will continue.

Syria ousts three U.S. embassy officials August 13 on charges of plotting to overthrow President Shukri al-Kuwatly. Washington asks Syrian embassy officials to leave, President Eisenhower charges Moscow with trying to take over Syria, and he reaffirms the Eisenhower Doctrine September 21. The Syrian president meets at Cairo with President Nasser, he meets in Syria September 25 with the premier of Iraq and the king of Saudi Arabia, and the meetings bolster Arab solidarity.

Moscow complains to Istanbul September 11 of Turkish troop concentrations on the Syrian border; Nikita Khrushchev writes October 12 to British and European labor and socialist parties, urging them to try to stop U.S. and Turkish aggression in the Mideast; Syria declares a state of emergency October 16; and Secretary of State John F. Dulles warns Moscow against an attack on Turkey. Moscow relieves Marshal Zhukov of his duties October 26 and exiles Vyacheslav Molotov to Siberia for conspiring against Nikita Khrushchev.

A Great Leap Forward launched by Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) in the People's Republic of China puts more than half a billion peasants into 24,000 "people's communes." The people are guaranteed food, clothing, shelter, and child care, but deprived of all private property.

Japanese diplomat Moru Shigemitsu dies of a heart ailment at Yugowara January 25 at age 69. Prime Minister Tanzan Ishibashi resigns in February after a brief ministry and is succeeded by his former rival Nobosuke Kishi.

Former Japanese Imperial Army colonel Kingoro Hashimoto dies of lung cancer at Tokyo June 29 at age 67. A U.S. military tribunal sentenced him to life imprisonment for atrocities committed in the 1937 rape of Nanking, but he gained release 2 years ago; former Japanese naval commander Adm. Soemu Toyoda dies at Tokyo September 22 at age 72. He was cleared of all war crimes in 1946; former Japanese militarist Shumei Okawa dies of a heart ailment near Tokyo December 24 at age 71. He was found insane in 1947 and war-crime charges against him were dismissed.

Philippines president Ramón Magsaysay is killed March 17 at age 49 along with 25 other persons in the explosion of his C-47 presidential transport plane, which then falls in flames on Mt. Bago, 22 miles north of Cebu City, where he has spoken at the commencement exercises of two universities. Magsaysay is succeeded by his vice president Carlos (Polestico) Garcia, 60, who was active in the resistance movement during World War II and is elected to a full term on the Nacionalista Party ticket later in the year. Former U.S. governor general of the Philippines (and 1914 Narcotics Act author) Francis Burton Harrison dies at Flemington, N.J., November 21 at age 83 and is buried at Manila.

Thailand's military ousts Premier Luang Phibunsongkhram, who has headed the government since 1948, permitted political parties, encouraged free speech, but countenanced widespread corruption and inefficiency (see 1958).

Malaya gains independence from Britain under the leadership of English-educated home minister Tunku (Prince) Abdul Rahman Putra Alhaj, 54, who will serve as prime minister until 1963. King (Tuanku) Abdul Rahman, now 62, has reigned as king of Negri Sembilan since the death of his father, Mohammed, in 1933 and is elected to serve as paramount ruler of the new nation for a 5-year term but will die in 1960 before completion of that term (see Malaysia, 1963).

Ghana becomes the first African state south of the Sahara to attain independence. The newly independent Gold Coast unites with the UN trust territory of British Togoland March 6, Ghana takes that name from the Sudanic empire that flourished between the 4th and 10th centuries, and Kwama N. Nkrumah, 47, begins a 15-year rule as prime minister of the Commonwealth State of Ghana.

Algerian FLN terrorists disrupt France, but President René Coty restates the government's refusal to grant independence (see 1954). The French Parlement votes Premier Bourges-Mannoury special powers July 18 to suppress the FLN (see de Gaulle, 1958).

Tunisia deposes the bey of Tunis July 25, proclaims herself a republic, and elects Habib Bourguiba president (see 1956). President Bourguiba asks for U.S. aid September 12 following border clashes with French and Algerian troops, Washington and London agree November 14 to supply small arms, and Tunisia announces November 18 that she has rejected a Soviet arms offer. Bourguiba will win election through universal suffrage in 1959, give the country a laical constitution, reduce the influence of religion on society, guarantee the rights of women, abolish polygamy and the veil, be appointed president for life in 1975, and hold office until November 1987.

Morocco's Sherifian Empire becomes the Kingdom of Morocco August 11, 5 months after signing a treaty of friendship and alliance with Tunisia (see 1956). The sultan Sidi Muhammad II becomes King Muhammad V and will reign until his death in 1961.

Canadian voters end 22 years of continuous Liberal Party rule and elect John G. (George) Diefenbaker, 61, to head a Progressive Conservative Party government that replaces the aging Louis Saint Laurent and will hold office as prime minister until 1963 (see 1958).

Guatemala's president Carlos Castillo Armas is assassinated at age 42 by a member of his guard July 26 as he and his wife prepare to enter the dining room of the presidential palace at Guatemala City (see 1954). The guard then turns the rifle on himself. Vice President Luis Arturo Gonzalez Lopez is sworn in to succeed Castillo Armas, he declares a state of siege throughout the country, basic constitutional rights are suspended, Gen. Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes is then elected president, and he continues policies favorable to the United Fruit Co., beginning a period of repression, terror, and violence that will continue for 3 decades.

British Guiana's People's Progressive Party (PPP) wins election and former prime minister Cheddi Jagan is returned to office (see 1953). The party's cofounder Forbes Burnham split along racial lines 2 years ago from the left-wing Jagan to form the more moderate People's National Congress, but although the office of prime minister will be eliminated for a few years, Jagan will head several successive governments until 1964 (see 1961).

Former Brazilian president Washington Luís dies at São Paulo August 4 at age 87, having returned from exile in Europe in 1946.

A Colombian military junta drives President Gustavo Rojas Pinilla out of office after 4 years in power and will replace him next year with former president Alberto Lleras Camargo, who served for 12 months from 1945 to 1946 and whose candidacy has been favored by a national-front coalition of Liberals and reactionaries who include the reactionary former president Laureano Eleuterio Gómez, who has returned once again from self-imposed exile in Spain.

Haitian voters elect opposition leader François "Papa Doc" Duvalier president in September (see 1956). Now 50, he reduces the size of Haiti's army and organizes a private force charged with terrorizing his alleged enemies; his chief aide Clément Barbot helps him set up the Tontons Macoutes ("Bogeymen") who will use assassination and torture to control the country (see 1961).

human rights, social justice

Ku Klux Klansmen accuse Alabama grocery-chain truck driver Willie Edwards, 25, of having made remarks to a white woman and force him at pistol point January 23 to jump to his death from the Tyler Goodwin Bridge into the Alabama River. His body is found downriver in Lowndes County in late April. Since January 23 was his first day on the truck route, it will be demonstrated that Edwards was not the man sought by the Klan.

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference established at Atlanta under the leadership of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. coordinates the activities of local organizations and helps them work for full equality of blacks in all aspects of U.S. life. The nonsectarian organization will operate mostly in the South and some border states (see 1958).

The Civil Rights Bill adopted by Congress September 9 is the first since 1875, when a law was passed during post-Civil War Reconstruction days; pushed through by Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson (D. Tex.), now 49, the measure makes it a federal crime to interfere with a citizen's right to vote, establishes a Commission on Civil Rights, authorizes the Department of Justice to obtain injunctions against states that interfere with voting rights, gives jurisdiction over such suits to U.S. district courts rather than state authorities, but is fundamentally toothless. Many Southerners have opposed the bill: Sen. Strom Thurmond (D. S.C.) spoke against it continuously for 24 hours and 18 minutes August 29, setting a new filibuster record; Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Sen. James O. Eastland voiced opposition, as did Sen. Richard B. B. Russell (D. Ga.). House Speaker Sam Rayburn supported it, President Eisenhower signs it into law while admitting publicly that he does not understand all of it, local authorities in the South find ways to circumvent it, and 80 percent of U.S. blacks remain disenfranchised (see 1964).

Little Rock, Ark., has a school integration struggle beginning September 4 as officials try to implement the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court. Arkansas governor Orval (Eugene) Faubus, 46, calls on the National Guard to "prevent violence" (i.e., thwart integration), and a jeering mob shouting racial epithets blocks nine black students from entering Central High School. Faubus appointed six black men to the Democratic State Committee after winning in 1953, was called "soft on racism" when he ran for reelection last year, and has decided that his political future depends on resisting integration (the entire state legislature has signed a Southern Manifesto attacking the 1954 Supreme Court decision as "naked judicial power"). Seeking to head off mob rule, South Carolina-born Arkansas Gazette executive editor Harry Scott Ashmore, 41, says in an editorial, "There is no valid reason to assume that delay will resolve the impasse which Mr. Faubus has made. We doubt that Mr. Faubus can simply wear the Federals out—although he is doing a pretty good job of wearing out his own people." Ashmore is hardly a rabid liberal, but local businessmen receive a letter stating that the Gazette, in its antisegregation position, is "playing a leading role in destroying time-honored traditions that have made up our Southern way of life." Arkansas State Press publisher and NAACP leader Daisy Lee Bates (née Getson), 42, leads the Little Rock Nine in their fight to desegregate Central High School, defying racist threats that include burning crosses on her front lawn. (A stone has been hurled through her window in August with a note reading, "Stone this time, dynamite next." Ashmore receives similar threats.) Bates stops a man from throwing a Molotov cocktail one night by firing her .38 pistol over his head, and after a 3-week standoff President Eisenhower dispatches 1,200 paratroopers to escort the nine students—Minnijean Brown, 16; Elizabeth Eckford, 15; Ernest Green, 16; Thelma Mothershed, 16; Melba Patillo, 15; Gloria Ray, 14; Terrence D. Roberts, 15; Jefferson Thomas, 15; and Carlotta Walls, 15—into Central High September 25 (see 1958).

Colombia, Honduras, and Malaya grant women the right to vote on the same basis as men.

Britain's Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution recommends an end to punitive laws against homosexuality "between consenting adults in private" (see Nonfiction [Wildeblood], 1955). Reading University chancellor Sir John Wolfenden, 51, heads the committee, whose report is issued in September; the Wolfenden Report also calls for an end to the requirement that "annoyance" be established before a constable may book a prostitute for soliciting a customer above the age of 21, but the recommendation on homosexuality is the part that creates a controversy. The Church of England supports the recommendations (see Street Offences Act, 1959).

exploration, colonization

Polar explorer-aviator Richard Evelyn Byrd dies of a heart ailment at Boston March 11 at age 68; German polar explorer Wilhelm Filchner at Zürich May 7 at age 79; Danish polar explorer Peter Freuchen of a heart attack at Anchorage, Alaska, September 2 at age 71.

Sputnik I is the world's first man-made Earth satellite; launched by the Soviet Union October 4, it embarrasses the United States and triggers a space race. Originally scheduled to be launched September 17 (the 100th birthday of the late Konstantin Tsiolkovsky), the 184-pound aluminum sphere orbits the Earth once every 90 minutes in an elliptical orbit, transmitting a radio signal that continues for days until its battery wears out. It is followed November 3 by Sputnik II, which weighs more than 1,000 pounds and carries a live dog. The U.S. space program has been unable to launch anything heavier than 20 pounds, and the Russian success creates alarms that the USSR may be able to drop bombs on America from space, but Minneapolis-born former New York Times Moscow bureau chief Harrison E. (Evans) Salisbury, 49, hears a Muscovite say, "Better to learn to feed your people at home before starting to explore the moon." German rocket engineer Wernher von Braun moved to Huntsville, Ala., as technical director of the U.S. Army ballistic weapon program in 1952 (see 1945), became a U.S. citizen in 1955, and has directed development of the Redstone, Jupiter-C, Juno, and Pershing missiles; he receives authority November 8 to proceed with development of a U.S. satellite (see 1958).

commerce

More than 10,000 West Germans line up for 10 hours outside the Economics Ministry at Bonn February 4 to wish Ludwig Erhard a happy 60th birthday (see 1948). His economic reforms have been so successful that the Deutsche mark is now fully convertible, Germans can easily travel abroad, and Erhard pushes through legislation making the Bundesbank (Germany's central bank) responsible for maintaining the Deutsche mark's stability.

Moscow and Paris sign a trade pact February 11.

The Treaty of Rome signed March 25 establishes a European Economic Community (the Common Market) (see Schuman Plan committee, 1953). Belgium, France, West Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands remove mutual tariff barriers to promote the economy of Europe and make it a viable competitor with Britain and the United States.

Britain relaxes restrictions on trade with the People's Republic of China May 30.

British tourists traveling to dollar areas receive an allowance increase June 4, and Britain decontrols most rents June 6, despite opposition from the Labour Party.

A University of Wisconsin study shows that 20 percent of Americans still live below the "poverty line" (see 1959).

Sen. Estes Kefauver investigates the effect on consumers of increasing mergers by U.S. automakers, steel companies, bread bakers, and pharmaceutical firms.

E. I. du Pont's 23 percent ownership of General Motors stock creates conditions that violate the antitrust laws, the Supreme Court rules June 3. Du Pont is ordered to divest itself of its GM stock (see 1915; 1929).

Fried. Krupp agrees to supply the Soviet Union with a chemical plant and a synthetic fiber complex. The German colossus has diversified from steelmaking.

Banker Baron James Armand de Rothschild dies at London May 7 at age 78; steel maker Sir Arthur Balfour, Lord Riverdale, near Sheffield July 7 at age 84; banker-art collector-horseman Count Maurice de Rothschild at Geneva September 4 at age 76; Anglo American Corp. and De Beers Consolidated Mines chairman Sir Ernest Oppenheimer at Johannesburg November 25 at age 77 (his Kimberley-born son Harry F., 49, gives up his seat in South Africa's Parliament and will head Anglo American until 1982 and De Beers until 1984).

A Theory of the Consumption Function by Brooklyn, N.Y.-born University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman, 45, opposes government intervention in the free market as favored by the late John Maynard Keynes. Friedman will become the leading proponent of a monetarist approach, advocating manipulation of the money supply to keep the economy on an even keel (see 1962).

Wall Street's Dow Jones Industrial Average reaches 465.82 October 3 but falls to 419.79 by October 22 as investors worry that the Soviet Union's launching of Sputnik may have given Moscow the lead in the space race and perhaps in other areas as well. The Dow closes December 31 at 435.60, down from 499.47 at the end of 1956.

retail, trade

The Hudson's Bay Company closes its York Factory (trading post) in northeastern Manitoba after 275 years of nearly continuous operation. Accessible only by air or canoe, it will be designated a national historic site.

The Southdale shopping mall opens in the Minneapolis suburb of Edina (see Northland, 1954). Designed by Victor Gruen, whose firm will develop auto-free environmental plans for Rochester and other U.S. cities, Southdale is a covered, heated, air-conditioned mall covering about 500,000 square feet with 75 shops. By the end of this decade the country will have about 3,700 shopping malls, up from about 100 in 1950, and upwards of 8,000 more will be built in the 1960s.

The first Toys "R" Us store opens at Washington, D.C. Retailer Charles Lazarus, 34, has adapted the self-service, supermarket approach to selling toys, with shopping carts, discount prices, and a broad selection. Within 40 years his chain will have 989 stores in 23 countries, dominating the retail toy business and expanding into apparel with 214 Kids "R" Us stores.

energy

A treaty signed at Rome March 25 creates the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) (see 1958).

Incandescent bulb pioneer Irving Langmuir dies of a heart attack at Falmouth, Mass., August 16 at age 76; former General Electric president Gerard Swope at New York November 20 at age 84.

The Wankel rotary engine produced at Lindau on Lake Constance by German engineer Fritz Wankel, 55, is the first new internal combustion engine since the Benz and Daimler engines of the 1880s and the 1895 diesel engine. Wankel replaces the up-down movement of oblong pistons in cylinders with a triangular disk that rotates inside a round cylinder. The slightly curved sides of the disk leave some space for the moving and expanding gases on at least two of its three sides, and the rotating disk opens and closes intake and exhaust valves automatically. The Wankel engine has only two moving parts and while it consumes slightly more fuel than conventional engines, it is smaller, weighs 25 percent less, works more smoothly, and costs less to build in mass production. The German NSU will be the first automobile to employ the new engine, but Toyo Kogyo in Japan will use a Wankel engine to power its Mazda beginning in 1968 as foreign automakers rush to obtain licenses to use the rotary engine that will employed also in pumps and other non-automotive applications.

Skelly Oil Co. founder William G. Skelly dies at Tulsa April 11 at age 78; oilman-philanthropist Hugh Roy Cullen at Houston July 4 at age 76 (he has provided financial support for the late Sen. McCarthy); Halliburton Oil Well Cementing Co. founder Erle P. Halliburton dies at Los Angeles October 13 at age 65.

transportation

Three U.S. Air Force jets complete a nonstop round-the-world flight January 18 having averaged more than 500 miles per hour.

Ohio-born Marine Corps major John (Herschel) Glenn, 36, sets a new transcontinental speed record July 16, flying a supersonic jet from California to New York in 3 hours, 20 minutes, 8.4 seconds (see 1949; exploration [Earth orbits], 1962).

Diesel power on U.S. railroads eclipses steam power. The last Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe steam locomotive is retired from service August 27 after 88 years of Santa Fe steam operation (see 1941).

New York retires its last trolley car from service across the Queensboro Bridge as motorbuses replace streetcars in most major U.S. cities (see General Motors, 1956).

New York makes its Avenue of the Americas (Sixth Avenue) one-way northbound despite objections from the Fifth Avenue Coach Co. and the Transport Workers Union (see 1956; 1960).

Michigan's Mackinac Bridge opens November 1 to connect Michigan's upper and lower peninsulas between Mackinaw City and St. Ignace. Built in 3½ years at a cost of $44.5 million, the 1,158-meter span is the world's longest suspension bridge to date.

The Edsel introduced by Ford Motor Company competes with the General Motors make Oldsmobile. Ford has invested $250 million to develop a new line of chrome-laden cars with horsecollar-shaped grilles, but although it incorporates forward-thinking ideas such as a speedometer that can be set to warn the driver that he is speeding and "idiot lights" that say things like "door ajar" and "service engine," the Edsel's highly touted push-button automatic transmission is actually its most troublesome feature. The smallest Edsel engine gets only eight miles per gallon, the make will be discontinued after its third (1960) model year, and its failure will raise doubts about the effectiveness of market research.

The Chevrolet Impala is introduced by General Motors, whose general manager calls the rear-drive V8 "a prestige car within the range of the average American citizen." Radio and television commercials feature Dinah Shore singing, "See the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet" and identifying the make with "baseball and hot dogs." The make will remain in production through the 1985 model year, with unit sales of some 13 million, and it will be revived in the 1990s.

Indiana-born Detroit labor leader James Riddle "Jimmy" Hoffa gains control of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which is ousted from the AFL-CIO on charges of corruption. Now 44, Hoffa organized his fellow Kroger grocery chain warehousemen when he was 17, won a brief strike, obtained an AF of L charter for his local the following year, and will make the Teamsters one of the country's most powerful labor unions (see 1964).

technology

IBM introduces the digital computer language FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslation) for numerical analysis computation. Developed 3 years ago by Philadelphia-born engineer John W. Backus, now 31, and other company engineers for programming scientific and mathematical applications, it was initially called Speedcoding, is based on algebraic formulas, and uses a sequence of 0s and 1s that a computer's controls interpret as instructions. IBM provides FORTRAN with each of its new 704 computers; feedback from users will help the company eliminate many of the language's initial "bugs," and it will be expanded to make it applicable for handling structured data, dynamic data allocation, recursive calls, and other uses, but as the first modern computer language it will remain the primary language for numerical analysis. The word software will not appear in print as a computer term until next year (see COBOL, 1959).

Fairchild Semiconductor Corp. is created at Mountain View, Calif., with backing from Sherman Fairchild of Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp., who instructs his British Columbia-born executive engineer Richard Hodgson, 40, to set up the company as a new division. Former Shockley Labs engineers Gordon E. Moore, 28, Robert (Norton) Noyce, 29, and five colleagues have approached 30 other companies without success; the new company is the first to work exclusively in silicon and pioneers the creation of what will be called "Silicon Valley" (see Shockley, 1947; microchip, 1959).

Control Data Corp. is organized to produce computers designed by Minneapolis engineer-mathematician Seymour R. Cray, 32, whose Model 1604 will be one of the first transistorized computers (see 1958; transistor, 1947).

Mathematician, "cybernetics" pioneer, and computer developer John von Neumann of Princeton's Institute of Advanced Study dies of cancer at Walter Reed Hospital February 8 at age 53, having made significant contributions to quantum physics, logic, meteorology, and the development of the hydrogen bomb as well as to computer science.

Some 1,000 electronic computers are shipped to U.S. and foreign customers, up from 20 in 1954 (see 1960).

An electric watch introduced by Hamilton Watch Co. uses a conventional balance wheel powered by a tiny battery (see Accutron, 1960).

science

New York-born Stanford University biochemist Arthur Kornberg, 39, and his associates produce synthetic DNA (see Watson, Crick, 1953; RNA, 1955); it is identical in chemical and physical structure with the actual genetic material but biologically inert (see 1966).

German-born biochemist Heinz L. Fraenkel-Conrat, 47, at the University of California, Berkeley, demonstrates how viral RNA can serve as a source of genetic information (see Ochoa, 1955); having conducted a series of experiments that involved disassembling the tobacco mosaic virus into its noninfectious protein and nearly noninfectious nucleic acid components, he shows that lesions on tobacco plants are produced by a fully infective virus that has been reconstituted using a core of ribonucleic acid, enveloped by a protein coating. Further studies will show that the nucleic acid part of the virus contains its infectivity and that RNA-splitting enyzmes (nucleases) break down that infectivity in the absence of viral protein.

Austrian-born English biochemist Max F. (Ferdinand) Perutz, 43, and English biochemist John Cowdery Kendrew, 40, discover the structure of the protein myoglobin (muscular hemoglobin) at the Medical Research Council Unit for Molecular Biology they founded in 1947 at Cambridge University. Perutz took the first X-ray diffraction pictures of hemoglobin crystals in 1937 while still a student at Cambridge, pioneering X-ray crystallography. Kendrew will found the Journal of Molecular Biology in 1959.

Munich-born doctoral student Rudolf Ludwig Mössbauer, 28, discovers that atomic nuclei under normal conditions recoil when they emit gamma rays and that the wavelength of the emission varies with the amount of recoil. The gamma rays in what will become known as the Mössbauer effect will be used not only to verify Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity but also to measure the magnetic fields of atomic nuclei.

Italian-born Soviet physicist Bruno Pontecorvo, 44, formulates a theory that the neutrino discovered last year has oscillations; a onetime student of the late Enrico Fermi who defected to Moscow in 1950, Pontecorvo shows that different species of neutrinos may exist and may be able to oscillate between them (see Goldhaber, Grodzins, Sunyar, 1958).

The Bardeen Cooper Schreiffer (BCS) theory of low-temperature superconductivity enunciated by transistor co-inventor John Bardeen, Leon N. Cooper, 27, and John R. (Robert) Schrieffer, 26, is the first satisfactory explanation.

medicine

Canada's parliament adopts a Hospital Insurance and Diagnostic Services Act through the efforts of minister of health and welfare Paul Martin, now 54 (see National Health Program, 1948).

A report issued July 12 by Indiana-born U.S. Surgeon General LeRoy E. (Edgar) Burney, 50, says, "It is clear that there is an increasing and consistent body of evidence that excessive cigarette smoking is one of the causative factors in lung cancer" (see 1954). Burney is the first federal official to make the connection; the Scientific Advisory Board to the Tobacco Industry Research Committee issues an immediate rebuttal, saying that Burney's report reflects the opinions of only a small number of researchers and "adds nothing new to what has been known about the cause of lung cancer" (see 1959).

Congress funds a National Cancer Institute to seek cures for the disease that is second only to heart disease as a cause of death in the United States.

Hypertension expert Robert W. Wilkins demonstrates the effectiveness of a new diuretic drug in reducing high blood pressure (see 1953). Chlorothiazide and other such drugs will become basic medications for treating the condition.

Italian researchers develop the antibiotic rifampia that will be used successfully to cure so-called "incurable" tuberculosis.

Yonkers, N.Y.-born physician and medical researcher D. (Daniel) Carleton Gajdusek, 33, at Melbourne's Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research makes a breakthrough in understanding a wasting disease of the central nervous system which occurs only among Fore tribespeople in New Guinea (who call it "kuru," or trembling). The course of the disease is similar to that of scrapie, which is transmitted among sheep, Gajdusek shows, and among the Fore it is transmitted by the ritualistic eating of the brains of the deceased at funeral ceremonies (he has lived among them, studied their language and culture, and performed autopsies on kuru victims). Further research by Washington, D.C.-born neurological researcher Clarence Joseph "Joe" Gibbs, now 32, will suggest that the delayed onset of the disease is due either to the possibility that it remains dormant for years or that it is caused by a virus or other organism that is capable of acting very slowly, findings that will have a significant bearing on the search for causes of Creutzfeld-Jakob disease, another degenerative brain disease.

The tranquilizer drug thalidomide introduced by a West German pharmaceutical house will soon be widely used in Europe, Britain, Canada, Australia, Japan, and many European countries to treat sleeplessness, nervous tension, asthma, and relief of nausea in early pregnancy (but see 1960).

Eli Lilly introduces Darvon (propoxyphene) as an alternative to the mildly addictive opiate codeine used since 1832. Chemically related to the psychotrophic drug methadone synthesized by German chemists in 1943, the new pain killer will be prescribed by physicians as a nonaddictive alternative to codeine, will be one of the most widely prescribed drugs although it costs 10 times as much as aspirin, is no more effective for most uses, and can be addictive.

A Senate investigation led by Estes Kefauver finds the pharmaceutical industry peculiarly vulnerable to monopolistic control. World War II injuries have spurred development of miracle drugs that were mostly unknown 20 years ago, and Kefauver says the industry "is charging all the traffic will bear in selling its new drugs," making profits of roughly 20 percent of total investment, double the average for other manufacturers. Prednisone has a captive market of arthritis sufferers, says Sen. Kefauver, and the 2-year-old drug fetches 30¢ per tablet while small, independent laboratories sell it in wholesale lots for as little as 2¢. Large pharmaceutical firms point out that their development costs are enormous (see Kennedy, 1962).

A high-speed (350,000 rpm) dental drill devised by Washington, D.C., dentist John V. Borden, 40, reduces patient time (and pain) but has problems. Refined, it will come into common use by 1971 and begin a new era of motorized dental instruments.

Psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich dies at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary November 3 at age 60 while serving a 2-year sentence for contempt and violation of the Food and Drug Act. The FDA has declared his "orgone box" to be a fraud, but Reich's supporters will remain bitter at the FDA's action; synthetic heparin anti-coagulant discoverer Jay McLean dies at Savannah November 14 at age 67; insulin-shock therapy pioneer Manfred J. Sakel at New York December 2 at age 57 (other methods of treatment will make his therapy obsolete).

religion

The Aga Khan III dies at Versoix, Switzerland, July 11 at age 79 after 73 years as spiritual and temporal leader of the Nizari Ismailite sect, whose numbers have grown to some 20 million. The immensely rich Sultan Sir Mohammed Shah is succeeded by his grandson Shah Karim, 21, a Harvard student who becomes Aga Khan IV.

"In God We Trust" appears on U.S. currency of all denominations beginning October 1 as religiosity gains ground in America (see coins, 1908; pledge of allegiance, 1954). Shrugging off the fact that German troops in World War II had the words "Gott mit Uns" ("God with Us") inscribed on their belt buckles, the Eisenhower administration recommended a bill to Congress in June 1955 providing for the inscription "on all United States currency and coins."

education

George Mason University has its beginnings in the Northern Virginia branch of the University of Virginia. The town (later city) of Fairfax will purchase 150 acres next year and donate the land to the university for a permanent branch campus (see 1966).

Psychologist Henry H. Goddard of 1912 Kallikak family fame dies at Santa Barbara, Calif., June 19 at age 90.

Primary school enrollment in French West Africa reaches 356,800, up from 156,000 in 1950, and enrollment in higher primary schools reaches 6,900, up from 2,200 in 1951 (see 1931). Gifted students go on to pursue higher education in France with help from scholarships awarded by the central government, the colonies, and local groups.

communications, media

Sylvania Electronics engineers at Buffalo, N.Y., use electronics in place of piano rolls to implement the communications system patented in 1942 by Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil. Within 5 years the U.S. Navy will be using it to secure naval communications, and beginning in the 1980s the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will allow its use in commercial radios, paving the way for simultaneous multi-channel telephone systems in which many cellular telephone and cordless phone callers will share the same range of radio frequencies without interfering with each others' signals (see 1983). (Spread Spectrum will be the basis for the security of the strategic MILSAT defense communications system.)

Britain's Independent Television News (ITN) goes on the air 3/19 showing 16 mm. film taken from the top of New York's Empire State Building. ITN will expand coverage to all parts of the world (to 1964).

Media magnate Roy H. Thomson obtains a license for commercial television in Scotland (seeThe Scotsman, 1953; Kemsley papers, 1959).

Pacifica Radio founder Lewis Hill commits suicide August 1 at age 38, but the listener-sponsored FM broadcasting idea that he pioneered in 1949 will grow with stations at Los Angeles (KPFK), New York (WBAI, 1960), Houston (KPFT, 1970), and Washington, D.C. (WPFW, 1977). Programmers refuse to have clocks in their studios in the belief that programs should simply end when they are over, their left-wing views will attract a devoted audience, and Pacifica will develop a substantial listener base, reaching 22 percent of U.S. homes (although barely 700,000 people will listen in any given week) (see Public Broadcasting Act, 1967).

Woman's Home Companion puts out its final issue January 4 after 58 years of monthly publication.

London's Mirror Group newspapers begin publishing the comic strip "Andy Capp," created by cartoonist Reg Smythe, 40. The strip about a crude, beer-guzzling, friendly, wife-beating, womanizing fellow whose floppy cloth cap is inevitably pulled down over his eyes will be syndicated to as many as 1,600 newspapers in 57 countries worldwide, and Smythe will continue drawing it until his death in 1998.

Pitney-Bowes cofounder Walter H. Bowes dies at Washington, D.C., June 24 at age 75; hate-monger Rev. Gerald B. Winrod of pneumonia at Wichita, Kansas, November 11 at age 57. He has published an anti-New Deal, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic newspaper since the 1930s; newspaper-chain founder Frank E. Gannett dies at Rochester, N.Y., December 3 at age 81; former New York Journal-American sportswriter Caswell Adams at Manhasset, N.Y., December 9 at age 50 (felled by a stroke in February, he is said to have coined the term Ivy League).

literature

Nonfiction: A World Restored and Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy by German-born Harvard government (political science) instructor Henry A. (Alfred) Kissinger, 34, who came to America with his family as a refugee in 1938. Later scholars will question whether the Congress of Vienna in 1815 "restored" anything, but Kissinger's latter work establishes his reputation as an authority on U.S. strategic policy. He opposes Secretary of State John Foster Dulles's policy of planning massive retaliation to any Soviet nuclear attack and favors a flexible response that combines the use of tactical nuclear weapons and conventional forces; The Soldier and the State by New York-born Harvard government (political science) instructor Samuel Huntington, 29, whose warning that America's liberal society requires the protection of a military organization draws so much criticism that its author will be denied tenure (he will teach at Columbia and Harvard will bring him back as a tenured professor in 1962); "Syntactic Structures" by Philadelphia-born linguist Noam Chomsky, 28, whose monograph proposes a theory of generative grammar that revolutionizes the study of language with the first concerted approach to investigating the human mind through a systematic study of how people produce and understand sentences; Art and Psychoanalysis by Partisan Review cofounder Philip Rahv; Mythologies by philosopher Roland Barthes, who explores semiologically such diverse cultural phenomena as children's toys, film stars' faces, and wrestling; The New Class by Yugoslav Communist dissident Milovan Djilas, 46, who was expelled from the party by President Tito 3 years ago and criticizes his country's corrupt leaders; The Crisis of the Old Order by historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. is the first of a projected four-volume history of the Franklin D. Roosevelt era; First Blood: The Story of Ft. Sumter by St. Paul, Minn.-born New York author W. A. (William Andrew) Swanberg, 49; The Hidden Persuaders by former Collier's magazine writer Vance (Oakley) Packard, 43, who attacks the advertising industry, saying, "Many of us are being influenced and manipulated, far more than we realize, in the patterns of our everyday lives," but his silly allegations that advertisers use "subliminal projection" to flash messages undermine his thesis; Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood by Mary McCarthy; Gypsy (autobiography) by stripteaser Gypsy Rose Lee (see Stage musicals, 1959); The Immense Journey by Nebraska-born University of Pennsylvania anthropology professor Loren (Corey) Eiseley, 50; The Great Chain of Life by Joseph Wood Krutch; Building Blocks of the Universe by Isaac Asimov; Please Don't Eat the Daisies (essays) by playwright Jean Kerr; Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing by playwright-continuity writer Robert Paul Smith, now 40.

Former Harvard philosophy professor Ralph Barton Perry dies outside Boston January 22 at age 80; Harvard Law School professor Zechariah Chafee at Boston February 8 at age 71; writer-critic-futurist painter Wyndham Lewis at London March 7 at age 72; "Basic English" pioneer C. K. Ogden at London March 21 at age 68; former Greek professor Gilbert Murray at Oxford May 20 at age 91; Oliver St. John Gogarty at New York September 22 at age 79.

Fiction: Doktor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak; Arturo's Island (L'Isola di Arturo) by Italian novelist Elsa Morante, 39, wife of Alberto Moravia; Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov; Jealousy (La jalousie) by Alain Robbe-Grillet; Castle to Castle (D'un Château à l'autre) by Louis Ferdinand Céline, who was released from prison 10 years ago and lives now as a recluse, providing medical services to the poor at Meudon, outside Paris; The Wind (Le Vent) by French novelist Claude Simon, 44; All Women Are Fatal (Toutes les femmes sont fatales) by French novelist Claude Mauriac, 43, a son of François, who was Charles de Gaulle's private secretary from 1944 to 1949 and has worked as a newspaper columnist and film critic; Justine by poet-travel writer-turned novelist Lawrence Durrell, now 45, is the first of his Alexandria Quartet novels; On the Beach by Nevil Shute, who foresees the last days of a world destroyed by nuclear holocaust; A Choice of Enemies by Canadian novelist Mordecai Richler, 26; The Wapshot Chronicle by New England novelist John Cheever, 45; A Death in the Family by the late James Agee; The Assistant by Bernard Malamud; The Anatomy Lesson and Other Stories by Kansas City-born writer Evan S. (Shelby) Connell Jr., 33; On the Road by Massachusetts-born New York novelist Jack (Jean-Louis) Kerouac, 35, who wrote the novel in 3 weeks in 1951; That Awful Mess on Via Merulana (Que Pasticciaccio Brutto de Via Merulana) by Italian novelist Carlo Emilio Gadda, 64; The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West; At Lady Molly's by Anthony Powell; Rockets Galore by Compton Mackenzie; Gimpel the Fool (stories) by Polish-born Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, 53; O Pays, Mon Beau Peuple by Senegalese novelist Sembene Ousmane, 34; The Comforters by Scottish novelist Muriel Spark (née Camberg), 39, who at age 19 traveled to Southern Rhodesia to marry a 32-year-old schoolteacher whom she had met at a dance and with whom she spent 7 unhappy years, prevented by wartime travel restrictions from returning home; Thunder on the Right by Mary Stewart; Rally Round the Flag, Boys! by Max Shulman; Say, Darling by Richard Bissell; From Russia with Love by Ian Fleming; The Claimant by Lincolnshire-born London solicitor-detective novelist Michael F. (Francis) Gilbert, 46.

Detective novelist Freeman Wills Crofts dies at Worthing, Sussex, April 11 at age 77; novelist-essayist Alfred Döblin at Emmendingen, near Freiburg-im-Breisgau, June 26 at age 78; novelist Malcolm Lowry of a sleeping-pill overdose at Ripe, Sussex, June 27 at age 47; Sholem Asch at London July 10 at age 76; Kenneth Roberts at Kennebunkport, Me., July 21 at age 71; Sicilian novelist Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa at Rome July 23 at age 60 (his only novel will be published next year); José Lins do Rego at Rio de Janeiro September 13 at age 56; Mary Roberts Rinehart at New York September 22 at age 82; Dorothy L. Sayers at Witham, Essex, December 17 at age 64.

Poetry: "Sunstone" ("Piedra del Sol") by Octavio Paz, now 43; Hermes, a Dog, and a Star by Zbigniew Herbert; Monologues (Monology) by Milan Kundera; Premier Testament by Alain Bosquet; Hear It Now by Denise Levertov; The Hawk in the Rain by English poet Ted Hughes, 27; Not Waving but Drowning by Stevie Smith; The Green Wall by Ohio-born poet James (Arlington) Wright, 29; Opus Posthumous by the late Wallace Stevens; Words for the Wind by Theodore Roethke; The Double Bed from the Feminine Side by Eve Merriam.

American Civil Liberties Union lawyers hired by poet-publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti win his acquittal October 3 in an obscenity suit brought against him by the San Francisco police for publishing Alan Ginsberg's 1955 poem "Howl." Federal authorities had declined to pursue the case, which has tested the First Amendment's freedom of speech guarantee.

Nobel poet-educator-diplomat Gabriela Mistral dies of cancer at Hempstead, N.Y., January 10 at age 67; poet-novelist-statesman Nikos Kazantzakis at Freiburg-im-Breisgau, Germany, October 26 at age 74.

Juvenile: The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss inaugurates a series of "Beginner Books," "Bright and Early Books," and "Big Beginner Books." LIFE magazine published a report in May 1954 about illiteracy among school children, Theodor Geisel's publisher Bennet Cerf sent him a list of 400 words he felt were important and asked him to cut it to 250 words; the new Dr. Seuss book uses only 220, it will be translated into more than 25 foreign languages, and it will have sales of between 8 and 9 million in the next 20 years; How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Dr. Seuss; Little Bear by Danish-born U.S. author Else Holmelund Minarik will be translated into 17 foreign languages, including Urdu and Bengali, will have U.S. sales of 1 million in the next 20 years, and begins a series of "I Can Read Books"; The Lonely Doll by Cleveland-raised New York author Dare Wright, 43, whose photographs illustrate the work; Bedknob and Broomstick by Mary Norton; Danny and the Dinosaur by New York-born writer-cartoonist Syd (Sydney) Hoff, 45, who sold his first cartoon to the New Yorker magazine at age 18. His book will have sales of more than 10 million copies worldwide; A Friend Is Someone Who Likes You by Hinsdale, Ill.-born author Joan Walsh Anglund, 24; The Doubtful Guest by Chicago-born New York author-illustrator Edward Gorey, 32, is about a penguinelike creature that moves into an upper-class home.

Author Laura Ingalls Wilder dies near Mansfield, Ohio, February 10 at age 90; author-illustrator Robert Lawson of a heart attack at Bristol, Conn., May 26 at age 64.

art

Painting: Betelgeuse by Hungarian-born French painter Victor Vasarely, 49; Berkeley #26, Woman in a Window, Freeway and Aqueduct, Girl Looking at Landscape, and Seawall by California painter Richard Diebenkorn, 35; Orange and White by Mark Rothko; Black on Black by Ad Reinhardt, who mixes subtle tones of olive, violet, and other deep colors in his blacks (he promulgates rules for what the artist should avoid, including texture, brushwork, drawing, forms, design, colors, light, space, time, size and scale, movement, and objects and symbols); Achromes (gesso and kaolin on canvas) by Piero Manzoni; Factum I, Factum II, and Painting with Red Letter 'S' by Robert Rauschenberg; Ladybug by Joan Mitchell; New York, N.Y. by Ellsworth Kelly; 1975D No. 1 by Clyfford Still; Two Against the White by Charles Sheeler; Las Meninas, after Velázquez (series) by Pablo Picasso; Annette by Alberto Giacometti; Billboard by Grace Hartigan; Mujeres peinandose and Sandias by Diego Rivera; Checkup by Norman Rockwell (cover illustration, Saturday Evening Post, September 7). Painter-writer-anthropologist Miguel Covarrubias dies at his native Mexico City February 4 at age 52; painter Jack (John Butler) Yeats at Dublin March 29 at age 87; Kokei Kobayashi at Tokyo April 3 at age 74; Diego Rivera of cancer at Mexico City November 25 at age 70.

Sculpture: Sculpture for a Large Wall by Ellsworth Kelly. Constantin Brancusi dies at Paris March 16 at age 81.

theater, film

Theater: The Potting Shed by novelist Graham Greene 1/29 at New York's Bijou Theater, with Sybil Thorndike, Leueen MacGrath, New York-born actress Carol Lynley, 14, Frank Conroy, 157 perfs.; A Visit to a Small Planet by Gore Vidal 2/7 at New York's Booth Theater, with Cyril Ritchard, Eddie Mayehoff, Philip Coolidge, Martyn Green, scenic design by Oliver Smith, 388 perfs.; The Tunnel of Love by Joseph Fields and Peter De Vries (based on De Vries's 1954 novel) 2/13 at New York's Royale Theater (to National 12/26, to Martin Beck 2/4/1958), with Tom Ewell, Darren McGavin, Elizabeth Wilson, 417 perfs.; Orpheus Descending by Tennessee Williams 3/21 at New York's Martin Beck Theater, with Maureen Stapleton, Cliff Robertson, 68 perfs.; Endgame (Fin de Parti) by Samuel Beckett 4/3 at London's Royal Court Theatre (in French); The Entertainer by John Osborne 4/10 at London's Royal Court Theatre, with Laurence Olivier (as Archie Rice), Dorothy Tutin, music by John Addison, 36 perfs.; A Moon for the Misbegotten by the late Eugene O'Neill 5/2 at New York's Bijou Theater, with Wendy Hiller, Franchot Tone, Cyril Cusack, 68 perfs.; Paolo Paoli by Arthur Adamov 5/24 at the Théâtre de la Comédie, Lyons; Compulsion by Meyer Levin 10/24 at New York's Ambassador Theater, with Roddy McDowell, Hollywood, Calif.-born actor Dean Stockwell, 21, Howard Da Silva, North Carolina-born ingénue Barbara Loden, 25, Brooklyn-born ingénue Ina Balin, 19, 140 perfs.; Time Remembered by Patricia Moyes (who has adapted a Jean Anouilh play) 11/12 at New York's Morosco Theater, with Richard Burton, Helen Hayes, Susan Strasberg, Glenn Anders, scenic design by Oliver Smith, 248 perfs.; The Rope Dancers by Morton Wishengrad 11/20 at New York's Cort Theater, with Irish actress Siobhan McKenna (Siobhan Giollamhuire Nic Cionnaith), 35, Art Carney, Theodore Bikel, 189 perfs.; Look Homeward, Angel 11/28 at New York's Ethel Barrymore Theater, with Jo Van Fleet, Anthony Perkins, Arthur Hill in a drama based on the 1929 Thomas Wolfe novel, 564 perfs.; The Dark at the Top of the Stairs by William Inge 12/5 at New York's Music Box Theater, with Denver-born actor Pat Hingle, 33, Teresa Wright, Eileen Heckart, 468 perfs.

Playwright Charles E. Clapp dies of a bacterial blood infection at Charlottesville, Va., January 2 at age 57; Takarazuka theater founder Ichizo Kobayashi at Osaka January 25 at age 84; actress Josephine Hull at her native Newtonville, Mass., March 12 at age 71; actor Grant Mitchell at Los Angeles May 1 at age 82; playwright-actor Sacha Guitry of cancer at Paris July 24 at age 72. He was accused of collaborating with the Germans but later cleared; playwright-novelist-poet Lord Dunsany dies at Dublin October 25 at age 79; actor Richard Taber at New York November 16 at age 72; actress Cora Witherspoon at Las Cruces, N.M., November 17 at age 67; playwright John Van Druten of heart disease at Indio, Calif., December 19 at age 56.

Television: The Benny Hill Show 1/5 on BBC with Southampton-born comedian Alfred Hawthorne "Benny" Hill, 33, whose innovative and risqué antics will continue on the air for 40 years, reaching audiences in 140 countries with slapstick humor; Emergency-Ward 10 on Britain's ATV is that nation's first long-running, twice-weekly soap opera. Set in the Oxbridge General Hospital, it has been written by Tessa Diamond (to 1967); Hi, Mom in March (daytime) on New York's WRCA-TV with five-foot, 97-pound ventriloquist-puppeteer Shari Lewis (née Hurwitz), 23, and her puppets Lamb Chop, Charlie Horse, Hush Puppy, Wing Ding. Lewis will add Shariland on Saturday mornings and be earning more than $75,000 per year by late 1958; the NBC network will carry her daily morning show until 1963, when it is replaced by a cheaper cartoon show, but she will continue for some 40 years to entertain children on TV; The Tonight Show 7/29 on NBC with Ohio-born conversationalist Jack Paar, 39, replacing Steve Allen, who left in January to start the Sunday night Steve Allen Show in competition with Ed Sullivan. Allen's regulars will include comedians Don Knotts, Bill Dana (as Latin astronaut José Jiminez), Pat Harrington (as Italian golfer Guido Panzini), and Louis Nye (as advertising executive Gordon Hathaway who calls Allen "Steverino"). Paar pioneers the talk-show format: Hugh Downs and Dearborn, Mich.-born radio veteran Art James (originally Arthur Efimchick), 27, are his announcers, José Melis leads the studio orchestra, regular guests will include Cliff Arquette (aka Charley Weaver), the Bil and Cora Baird puppets, Joey Bishop, Peggy Cass, Hans Conreid, Dodie Goodman, Buddy Hackett, Pat Harrington Jr. (as Guido Panzini), Florence Henderson, Mary Margaret McBride, and Elsa Maxwell (initially broadcast live at 11:30, the show will soon be taped earlier in the evening; to 3/30/1962; see 1960); Bachelor Father 9/15 on CBS with John Forsythe, Noren Corcoran (to 9/25/1962); Wagon Train 9/18 on NBC with Frank McGrath, Robert Horton, Ward Bond (to 9/5/1965); Have Gun, Will Travel 9/21 on CBS with Richard Boone as the mercenary cowboy Paladin, whose tastes run to Ming porcelain and Château Haut-Brion wines (to 4/20/1963; Providence, R.I., mechanic Victor DeCosta, 49, sues CBS for stealing the character he developed as an entertainer more than a decade ago; a federal appeals court will find in DeCosta's favor in 1991; when he is 83, he will collect $3.5 million, and syndicated re-runs of the show will be terminated); Perry Mason 9/21 on CBS with Raymond Burr as a defense attorney, Barbara Hale as his legal secretary Della Street, in a full-hour mystery series based on the Erle Stanley Gardner thrillers (to 9/4/1966); Maverick 9/22 on ABC with Oklahoma-born actor James Garner (James Baumgardner), 29, Jack Kelly, Edmond Lowe (to 4/27/1962); Colt .45 9/30 on ABC with Wayde Preston, Erin O'Brien, (to 6/21/1960); The Real McCoys 10/3 on ABC with Walter Brennan, Kathy Nolan, Richard Crenna as an East-Coast family that inherits a California ranch (to 9/23/1963); The Pat Boone Show 10/3 on ABC with host Boone (to 6/23/1960); Leave It to Beaver 10/4 on CBS with Jerry Mathers, 9, as Theodore "Beaver" Cleaver, Barbara Billingsley in the first TV program to show the world as seen through the eyes of a child (to 9/12/1963); The Price Is Right 10/7 on NBC with host Bill Cullen giving merchandise to guests who guess right. The show will have 31.5 million viewers by the end of 1960 (plus 6.5 million who watch a morning version that has aired since November of last year) (to 9/11/1964).

Films: David Lean's Bridge on the River Kwai with William Holden, Alec Guinness, Jack Hawkins, Sessue Hayawkawa; Martin Ritt's Edge of the City with John Cassavetes, Sidney Poitier, Jack Warden, Ruby Dee; Federico Fellini's Nights of Cabiria (Le notti di Cabiria) with Giulietta Masina; Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory with Kirk Douglas, Ralph Meeker; Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood with Toshiro Mifune; Sidney Lumet's Twelve Angry Men with Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb, Ed Begley, E. G. Marshall, Jack Klugman, Jack Warden, Martin Balsam; Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries with Victor Sjöström, Ingrid Thulin, 31, Bibi Andersson, 22; Billy Wilder's Witness for the Prosecution with Marlene Dietrich, Tyrone Power, Charles Laughton, Elsa Lanchester. Also: Mikhail Kalatozov's The Cranes Are Flying with Tatyana Samoilova, Alexei Batalov; Walter Lang's Desk Set with Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn; Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd with Andy Griffith, Patricia Neal, Lee Remick, Walter Matthau; Helmut Kautner's The Last Bridge with Maria Schell; Joseph Pevney's Man of a Thousand Faces with James Cagney (as Lon Chaney Jr.), Dorothy Malone, Jane Greer; Mark Robson's Peyton Place with Lana Turner, Connecticut-born actress Hope Lange, 23, San Francisco-born actress Diane Varsi, 19, Mildred Dunnock, Arthur Kennedy; Joshua Logan's Sayonara with Marlon Brando, Ricardo Montalban, Miiko Taka, Japanese-born actress Miyoshi Umeki (as Katsumi); Alexander Mackendrick's Sweet Smell of Success with Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis; Nunnally Johnson's The Three Faces of Eve with Georgia-born actress Joanne (Gignilliat) Woodward, 27, David Wayne, Lee J. Cobb; Delmer Daves's 3:10 to Yuma with Van Heflin, Glenn Ford; Frank Tashlin's Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? with Tony Randall, Jayne Mansfield, Betsy Drake, Joan Blondell.

Hanna-Barbera Productions is founded by New Mexico-born M-G-M animator William (Denby) Hanna, 47, and his New York-born colleague Joseph (Roland) Barbera, 46, who together created the Tom and Jerry cartoon characters after joining M-G-M in 1930 and have produced more than 200 Tom and Jerry films since 1940.

Actor William Eythe dies of hepatitis at Hollywood, Calif., January 26 at age 38; Humphrey Bogart of esophageal cancer at Hollywood January 14 at age 56; veteran production designer William Cameron Menzies at Hollywood March 25 at age 60; director Max Ophuls of heart disease at Hamburg March 26 at age 54; actor Gene Lockhart of a coronary thrombosis at Santa Monica March 31 at age 66; Balaban & Katz movie-theater chain head John Balaban of a heart attack at Chicago April 4 at age 62; director-actor Erich von Stroheim of cancer at his home outside Paris May 12 at age 71; director James Whale commits suicide in the swimming pool of his Pacific Palisades, Calif., home May 29 at age 67 (he has had a series of strokes); comedian Oliver Hardy dies at North Hollywood August 7 at age 65 nearly a year after suffering a paralytic stroke; Indian actor N. S. Kirshnan dies in September at Madras (100,000 of his fans turn out to mourn his passing and police are hard pressed to keep order); pioneer producer Louis B. Mayer dies of leukemia at Hollywood October 29 at age 72 (thousands attend his funeral, and his longtime nemesis Samuel Goldwyn quips that it is only "because they wanted to make sure he was dead"); newsreel pioneer Charles Pathé dies at Monte Carlo December 30 at age 94 (he retired in 1929); Norma Talmadge dies of pneumonia at Las Vegas December 24 at age 61. She made at least 67 pictures before retiring in 1930, but arthritis has confined her to a wheelchair for several years.

music

Hollywood musicals: Billy Wilder's Love in the Afternoon with Gary Cooper, Audrey Hepburn, Maurice Chevalier (who returned to France in 1935, spent most of World War II in seclusion, and has never quite recovered from the death of his mistress Mistinguett in 1956), screenplay by Romanian-born writer I. A. L. Diamond (originally Itek Dommnici), 37, songs that include "Fascination" by F. D. Marchetti and Maurice de Feraudy and "C'est Si Bon" by Herni Betti and André Hornez; George Cukor's Les Girls with Gene Kelly, Chicago-born actress-singer-dancer Mitzi Gaynor (Francesca Mitzi von Gerber), 25, Kay Kendall, Taine Elg; Stanley Donen's Funny Face with Fred Astaire, Audrey Hepburn, Kay Thompson, model Suzy Parker; George Abbott and Stanley Donen's The Pajama Game with Doris Day, John Raitt, Carol Haney.

Stage musicals: At the Drop of a Hat (revue) 1/24 at London's Fortune Theatre, with entertainers Michael Flanders and Welsh-born entertainer-composer-pianist Donald (Ibrahim) Swann, 31, music and lyrics by Flanders (who is confined to a wheelchair by polio) and Swann, who served in the Friends Ambulance Unit during the war and then teamed up with his former Oxford schoolmate, 733 perfs.; The Ziegfeld Follies 3/11 at the Winter Garden Theater, with Beatrice Lillie, Billy de Wolfe, Jane Morgan in the 24th and final edition of the Follies 50 years after its first opening. Music by Sammy Fain, Jack Lawrence, Michael Myers, and others, lyrics by Howard Dietz, Carolyn Leigh, and others, 123 perfs.; New Girl in Town 5/14 at the 46th Street Theater, with Gwen Verdon, Thelma Ritter in a musical version of the 1921 Eugene O'Neill play Anna Christie, music and lyrics by Bob Merrill, songs that include "Sunshine Girl," 431 perfs.; West Side Story 9/26 at the Winter Garden Theater, with a book based on the 1595 Shakespeare tragedy Romeo and Juliet, choreography by Jerome Robbins and Peter Gennaro, music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by New York-born writer Stephen Sondheim, 27, songs that include "Tonight," "Maria," 732 perfs.; Jamaica 10/31 at the Imperial Theater with veteran nightclub singer Lena Horne, now 40, Ricardo Montalban, Ossie Davis, music by Harold Arlen, lyrics by E. Y. Harburg, 558 perfs.; The Music Man 12/19 at the Majestic Theater, with Robert Preston, music and lyrics by Meredith Willson, songs that include "Seventy-Six Trombones," "Gary, Indiana," "Till There Was You," 1,375 perfs.

Onetime Ziegfeld Follies lyricist Gene Buck dies at Manhasset, N.Y., February 24 at age 71; bass-baritone Ezio Pinza in his sleep at his Stamford, Conn., home May 9 at age 64 following a series of strokes; former Ziegfeld girl Peggy Hopkins Joyce dies of throat cancer at New York June 12 at age 62; British musical star Jack Buchanan of spinal arthritis in a London nursing home October 20 at age 64.

Opera: Dialogues des Carmelites 1/26 at Milan's Teatro alla Scala, with music by Francis Poulenc, libretto from the novel and play by the late Georges Bernanos; DieHarmonie der Welt 8/11 at Munich, with music by Paul Hindemith (see science, 1619).

German tenor Wolfgang (Fritz Hermann) Windgassen, 32, makes his Metropolitan Opera debut 1/22 singing the title role in the 1876 Wagner opera Siegfried; Elizabeth Söderstrom her Glyndebourne debut singing the role of the composer in the 1916 Strauss opera Ariadne auf Naxos; Swedish tenor Nicolai (Harry Gustav) Gedda (originally Ustinov), 32, his Met debut 11/1.

The Boston Opera Group is founded by Missouri-born conductor-producer Sarah Caldwell, 33, who will rename it the Opera Company of Boston as it gains a reputation for innovative productions.

Tenor Beniamino Gigli dies of pneumonia at Rome November 30 at age 67.

Ballet: The Prince and the Pagodas 1/1 at London, with music by Benjamin Britten; Agon 6/17 at Los Angeles, with music by Igor Stravinsky, now 75.

First performances: Declaration (symphonic variations) by Morton Gould 1/20 at Washington's Constitution Hall; Concerto for Cello by William Walton 1/25 at Boston's Symphony Hall; Jekyll and Hyde Variations by Morton Gould 2/2 at Carnegie Hall; Symphony No. 2 by the late Charles Ives (who wrote it between 1897 and 1901) 2/22 at Carnegie Hall; Lydian Ode by Paul Creston 2/24 at Wichita; Symphony No. 6 by David Diamond 3/8 at Boston's Symphony Hall; Symphony No. 5 by Arthur Honegger 3/9 at Boston's Symphony Hall; Symphony No. 4 by Walter Piston 3/30 at Minneapolis; Symphony No. 10 by Heitor Villa-Lobos 4/4 at Paris; Song of Democracy by Howard Hanson 4/9 at Washington, D.C.; Concerto No. 2 for Piano and Orchestra by Dmitri Shostakovich 5/10 at Moscow, with Maxim Shostakovich as soloist; Monopartita by Honegger 6/12 at Zürich; Stabat Mater by Francis Poulenc 6/13 at Strasbourg; Polyphonie X for 17 Solo Instruments by French composer Pierre Boulez, 26, 10/6 at the Donaueschippu Festival of Contemporary Music; Toccata for Orchestra by Creston 10/18 at Cleveland's Severance Hall; Apocalypse (Symphonic Poem) by Gian Garlo Menotti 10/19 at Pittsburgh; Symphony No. 11 (1905) by Shostakovich 10/30 at Moscow; Erosion, or The Origin of the Amazon River (Symphonic Poem) by Villa-Lobos 11/7 at Louisville; Symphony No. 3 by Roger Sessions 12/26 at Boston's Symphony Hall.

Conductor Arturo Toscanini dies at Riverdale, N.Y., January 16 at age 89 (he suffered a stroke in December); composer Jean Sibelius of a stroke at his home near Helsinki September 20 at age 91; composer-conductor Eric Coates following a stroke at Chichester, England, December 21 at age 71.

Popular songs: "Rock 'n' Roll Music," "School Days," and "Havana Moon" by Chuck Berry (with pianist Johnny Johnson, 33); "A White Sport Coat and a Pink Carnation" by Marty Robbins; "All the Way" by Jimmy Van Heusen, lyrics by Sammy Cahn (for the film The Joker Is Wild with Frank Sinatra); "April Love" by Sammy Fain, lyrics by Paul Francis Webster (title song for film); "Bye Bye, Love" by Boudleaux Bryant, lyrics by his wife, Felice; Miles Ahead (album) by Miles Davis; "Young Love" by Carole Joyner and Ric Cartey; "Tammy" by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans (for the film Tammy and the Bachelor); "Matchbox" by Carl Perkins; "Jailhouse Rock" by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller; "Old Cape Cod" by Claire Hothrock, Milt Yakers, and Allan Jeffrey; Winchester, Va.-born country singer Patsy Cline (Virginia Patterson Hensley), 24, sings "Walkin' after Midnight" by Donn Hecht 1/28 for Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts to begin a career in which she will score hits with songs such as "Heartaches," "Cry Not for Me," and "Fingerprints"; "I Can't Stop Loving You" and "Oh Lonesome Me" by North Carolina-born Tennessee country music songwriter Don Gibson, 29. An elementary school dropout who has been living in a trailer on $30 per week, Gibson has written the two songs June 7; Detroit cabaret singer Della Reese (Dellareese Taliaferro), 25, records "In the Still of the Night" and then has a hit with her recording of "And That Reminds Me"; "Soul Eyes" by New York-born pianist-composer Mal Waldron, 32; Chicago-born jazz singer Abbey Lincoln (Anna Marie Wooldridge), 27, makes her recording debut with "Affair . . . The Story of a Girl in Love"; Blossom Dearie and Give Him the Ooh-La-La (albums) by East Durham, N.Y.-born pianist-songwriter Dearie launches a recording career for the 29-year-old supper club singer; In London (album) by Teresa Brewer, who has a hit single with "You Send Me" by Sam Cooke (the pop number goes to the top of all the charts and establishes Cooke as a superstar); "Jim Dandy" by LaVern Baker; Eric Hilliard "Ricky" Nelson of the popular TV sitcom The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet records his rock 'n' roll song "I'm Walkin'" and scores such a hit that Ricky, now 17, rivals Elvis Presley, but his fan mail includes some criticism that someone from such a wholesome family could be involved with rock 'n' roll.

American Broadcasting Company gives disk jockey Alan Freed his own nationally televised rock 'n' roll show but cancels the show after black performer Frank Lyman dances with a white girl, enraging Southern affiliates (see 1954). Freed has been taking "payola" from song pluggers to play certain records on the air (see 1962).

Motown Corp. is founded by Detroit entrepreneur Berry Gordy Jr., 30, who invests $700 to start a recording company whose "Motown Sound" will figure large in popular music for more than 2 decades.

The Kingston Trio folk music group is founded by former Stanford University students Dave Guard, 23, Nick Reynolds, and Bob Shane who will help spark a boom in folk music.

Bandleader Jimmy Dorsey dies of lung cancer at New York June 12 at age 53; bandleader-songwriter Abe Lyman at Los Angeles October 23 at age 60.

sports

Jockey Johnny Longden rides his 5,000th winner February 18 (see 1952). Now 50, he is the first to do so, and he will continue riding until 1966.

Ontario hockey player Robert Martin "Bobby" Hull Jr., 18, drops out of St. Catherines Collegiate School to join the Chicago Black Hawks, with whom he will play until 1972, using a swinging slap shot that will make him a dominant scorer.

Middleweight boxing champion Sugar Ray Robinson, now 36, loses the title January 2 to Gene Fullmer, regains it from Fullmer May 2, and loses it again September 23 to Carmen Basilio.

The Boston Celtics win their first National Basketball Association, primarily through the efforts of New York-born player Robert Joseph "Bob" Cousy, 28, who stands only six-foot-one but is voted most valuable player in the NBA.

Lew Hoad wins in men's singles at Wimbledon, Althea Gibson, 29, (U.S.) in women's singles (the first black American to be invited). Gibson receives a ticker tape parade up Broadway July 11, Mayor Wagner tells her, "If we had more women like you the world would be a better place," and she goes on to win the singles title at Forest Hills. Malcolm James "Mal" Anderson, 22, wins in men's singles.

Golfer Louise Suggs wins the U.S. LPGA tournament; now 33, she also wins the Vare trophy for low-stroke average.

Brooklyn's 44-year-old Ebbets Field closes September 24 to make way for the 1,318-unit, middle-income Ebbets Field Apartments (later called the Jackie Robinson Apartments), covering an area bounded by McKeever Place, Bedford Avenue, Sullivan Place, and Montgomery Street. "Dem bums" prepare to move to Los Angeles.

The Milwaukee Braves win the World Series, defeating the New York Yankees 4 games to 3.

everyday life

Vail, Colo., has its beginnings as a ski resort March 19 when skier and entrepreneur Pete Seibert, 33, follows local uranium prospector Earl Eaton, 34, up a deserted and nameless mountain and beholds a breathtaking view. Within 5 years the two will have developed the site (and the sheep pasture beneath it) into what will become the most popular snow-sport destination in America, with 5,289 acres of trails that will attract 1.5 million visitors per year.

The Frisbee is introduced by the Wham-O Manufacturing Co. of San Gabriel, Calif., which has been licensed by Los Angeles inventor Walter Frederick Morrison to produce the plastic "Pluto Platter" devised by Morrison in 1948. New England college students have tossed metal pie tins produced since 1871 by the Frisbie Baking Co. of Bridgeport, Conn. (the company will go out of business next year), Morrison will obtain a patent next year for his faster, more accurate flying disc, Wham-O's Rich Knerr will come up with the registered trademark Frisbee, and his company will sell upwards of 100 million units before Mattel Corp. acquires the toy. The Frisbee launches a new sport whose first world champion will be crowned in 1968.

The Education of a Poker Player by former cryptographer Herbert O. Yardley, now 68, will survive as a classic analysis of the game.

The Dunes Hotel at Las Vegas introduces topless "exotic dancers" (the girls wear pasties over their nipples) to attract patrons, beginning a trend that will continue for decades (see Lido de Paris, 1960). The show costs $9,000 and will continue for 9 years. Local authorities have outlawed prostitution in Las Vegas, but a crackdown on brothels outside the city limits has produced an upsurge in streetwalkers and escort services at the nation's gambling mecca.

Off mosquito repellent is introduced in an aerosol can by S. C. Johnson of Racine, Wis. (see Raid, 1956; Pledge, 1958).

Murphy bed inventor William L. Murphy dies at St. Petersburg, Fla., May 23 at age 81.

The "sack silhouette" is introduced by Paris fashion designers Cristóbal Balenciaga and Hubert de Givenchy.

Italian-born Paris couturier Pierre Cardin (originally Cornelius Castoriadis), 35, introduces his first haute couture collection. Cardin opened his own house 7 years ago after working for Christian Dior, created a sensation in 1954 with his Robes Bulles, and will be the first Paris designer to sell ready-to-wear through department stores (see menswear, 1960).

Paris couturier Christian Dior dies of a heart attack while vacationing at Montecatini, Italy, October 24 at age 52. His shy but talented Algerian-born protégé Yves (Mathieu-) Saint Laurent, 21, was hired to work in his studio just 2 years ago and is appointed chief designer of the House of Dior; Saint Laurent's first collection is a commercial triumph, but like those of his late mentor his designs are far less creative than those of Balenciaga and Givenchy (see 1962).

crime

Former Chicago gangster George C. "Bugs" Moran dies of lung cancer in federal prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, February 25 at age 54 after beginning a 10-year sentence for robbery; former Chicago gangster Johnny Torrio dies at Brooklyn, N.Y., April 16 at age 75.

A .32 caliber bullet grazes New York mobster Frank Costello's head May 2 in the lobby of the Majestic apartment house where he lives. His would-be assassin, Vincent (the Chin) Gigante, escapes, and Costello rushes to the emergency room of Roosevelt Hospital; he is not badly hurt, but police search his pockets and find a slip showing more than $1 million in winnings from his gambling casinos.

Former crime fighter Eliot Ness dies of a heart attack at Coudersport, Pa., May 7 at age 54, having been divorced twice, been involved in an auto accident that involved drinking and leaving the scene, made bad investments, and suffered a disastrous defeat in a campaign for mayor. His book The Untouchables (written with Oscar Fraley) is published in late summer (see Films, 1987).

Mafia lieutenant Frank (Don Cheech) Scalice is shot four times in the head June 17 while shopping for peaches at a Bronx fruit stand. Scalice is a henchman of former Murder, Inc., boss Albert Anastasia, who is killed October 25 at age 55 in the barbershop of New York's Park-Sheraton Hotel by two gunmen reputedly in the pay of Vito Genovese.

Apalachin, N.Y., makes headlines when police find 58 Mafia members from all over the United States gathered November 14 at the $150,000, 58-acre estate of Joseph Barbara Sr., 51. Included are Vito Genovese, Joseph Bonanno, Carlo Gambino, Joseph Profaci, Jerry Catena, and Mike Miranda, but authorities are unable to determine the purpose of the meeting.

architecture, real estate

Los Angeles adopts a revised building code that permits construction of high-rise buildings. The code reflects the development of earthquake-stress engineering technology.

Architect Julia Morgan dies at her native San Francisco February 2 at age 85, having designed nearly 800 buildings, most of them in San Francisco and other parts of California.

The Marriott hotel and motel chain has its beginnings at Arlington, Va., where fast-food-chain entrepreneur J. Willard Marriott, now 57, opens the 365-room Twin Bridges Motor Hotel close to one of the interstate highways being built under the program established last year by Congress. The root-beer stand that Marriott and his wife, Alice, opened 30 years ago has mushroomed into a nationwide enterprise, as will the Marriott venture into the lodging industry.

The Hyatt hotel chain has its beginnings at Los Angeles International Airport, where lawyer-accountant Jay Pritzker, 35, has a cup of coffee at the airport hotel's coffee shop, Fat Eddie's, while waiting for a flight and notices that the place seems unusually busy. Pritzker has been buying small lumber mills and other companies for the past 6 years, he discovers that the hotel (named for its owner, Hyatt Von Dehn) is for sale, and he writes an offer of $2.2 million on a napkin, speculating that businesmen like himself will want to stay at a first-class hotel near a large airport. He and his brother Robert will build a second Hyatt hotel near San Francisco International Airport at Burlingame, they will put up others near airports and in town at Seattle, Atlanta, Chicago, and other cities, and by the end of 1998 they will have 182 hotels with 34 more under construction (see Pritzker Architectural Prize, 1979).

Florida's $17 million Americana Hotel at Bal Harbour is completed to designs by Morris Lapidus of 1954 Fontainebleau fame. Managing the property is Brooklyn, N.Y.-born garment maker's son Laurence A. (Alan) Tisch, now 33, who graduated magna cum laude from New York University at age 18, obtained a master's degree in industrial management from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School a year later, served in the OSS during World War II, started his business career in 1946 with a rundown New Jersey resort hotel that he found listed in the New York Times Business Opportunities section and bought for $124,000 in family money, enlisted help from his brother Robert Preston, now 30, and with Bob has operated two hotels in Atlantic City, plus one in New York; they will create an empire of hotels, movie theaters, tobacco products, and broadcasting properties.

environment

An earthquake in the Soviet Union June 27 leaves 1,200 dead; an equal number die in a quake that rocks part of Iran 5 days later, registering 7.4 on the Richter scale; an Iranian quake that registers 7.3 kills 1,130 December 13.

The Chinese work to bring under control the Huanghe (Yellow River), which has for centuries overrun its banks 2 years out of 3 to create floods that have produced havoc, famine, and desolation (see 1933).

Aswan Dam designer Murdoch MacDonald dies at Nairn, Scotland, April 24 at age 91.

agriculture

Huge irrigation projects add $100 million acres of irrigated cropland to China's agricultural resource and give the nation 60 times as much irrigated cropland as Europe. Chinese cereal grain production rises to 200 million tons after having increased in the past 7 years at an annual rate of 8 percent while the rest of the world has never exceeded a rate of 3 percent (but see 1958).

Hawaii has upward of 73,000 acres planted to pineapples, more than 30,000 of them by Hawaiian Pineapple Co., which packs more than 30 million cases of canned fruit, supplying 84 percent of U.S. demand and 72 percent of world demand. The company's Honolulu cannery is the world's largest, capable of converting 2.5 million pineapples into nearly 5 million cans of fruit and juice in any 24-hour period.

food and drink

A new process mixes high-protein soy flour with an alkaline liquid to create a spinning solution that is fed under pressure into spinning machines (see 1949). Food company engineers will develop improvements on this spinning technique, and others will adapt extrusion methods from the plastics industry to develop new meat analogs from soy protein isolate (see Bac*Os, 1966).

U.S. per-capita margarine consumption overtakes butter consumption for the first time. The average American uses 8.6 pounds of margarine per year versus 8.3 pounds of butter (see 1960).

restaurants

Ritz-Carlton executive chef Louis F. Diat dies at New York August 29 at age 72; Diners Club founder Frank X. McNamara of a heart attack at Manhasset, Long Island, November 9 at age 40.

population

China's Ministry of Public Health takes steps to relax limitations on sterilization and abortion (see 1956). Birth control clinics throughout the country are expected to set up "guidance committees" (see 1971).

Gregory Pincus and Boston gynecologist John Rock, 67, begin an intensive trial of birth-control pills to prevent unwanted births in the Rio Piedras section of San Juan, Puerto Rico (see 1955). Working with the Family Planning Association of Puerto Rico, a Planned Parenthood affiliate, they use pills containing 10 mg of G. D. Searle's synthetic progesterone norethynodrel and 0.15 mg of mestranol, a synthetic estrogen. Women who take The Pill for 20 days of the month in January and February experience normal menstrual flows at the end of the month, but nearly 20 percent report at least one side effect, including dizziness, headache, weight gain, stomach pain, or diarrhea. Pincus will later reveal that many of the women took pills with higher amounts of the synthetic estrogen (see Enovid-10, 1960).

The United States has a record 4.3 million births as the baby boom continues.

Munich's population reaches 1 million as of December 15; 71 cities worldwide have populations of more than 1 million, up from 10 in 1914.

1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960

Astronomy

Astronomer Bernard Lovell and engineer Sir Charles Husband supervise construction of a steerable 76-m (250-ft) radio telescope at Jodrell Bank, which comes into operation this year. See also 1946 Astronomy; 1993 Astronomy.

Martin Ryle suggests that changes in brightness of Seyfert galaxies are caused by the ejection of blobs of matter that travel at nearly the speed of light. See also 1971 Astronomy.

Mahlon Bush Hoagland [b. Boston, Massachusetts, October 5, 1921], working with protein synthesis, establishes that transfer-RNA combines with specific amino acids, following instructions from DNA. It will be later established that these acids are then combined with each other by messenger RNA. See also 1953 Biology; 1960 Biology.

Arthur Kornberg synthesizes DNA by the action of enzymes on nucleic-acid bases, or nucleotides. The DNA is not biologically active, however. See also 1956 Biology; 1959 Biology.

Sune K. Bergström [b. Stockholm, Sweden, January 10, 1916] isolates prostaglandins from sheep glands. See also 1982 Biology.

Melvin Calvin describes the metabolic path of carbon in photosynthesis. See also 1961 Chemistry.

Sir Alexander Todd of England wins the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his study of nucleic acids. See also 1939 Chemistry.

Herbert Simon, Allen Newell, and J. Cliff Shaw develop the program GPS (General Problem Solver). It is derived from Logic Theorist and is an early form of artificial intelligence program. John McCarthy founds the Artificial Intelligence Department at MIT. See also 1956 Communication; 1959 Communication.

English geophysicist Sir Edward Crisp Bullard [b. September 21, 1907, d. April 3, 1980] leads the team that develops potassium-argon dating, used for dates too young for uranium dating and too old for the carbon-14 technique. See also 1947 Archaeology; 1983 Archaeology.

George Evelyn Hutchinson [b. Cambridge, England, January 30, 1903, d. May 17, 1991] defines the ecological niche as an abstract hypervolume in a space with axes for each of the environmental and biological variables that affect the organism whose niche it is; that is, the niche is a region both in space and in possible behaviors that the organism occupies. See also 1959 Ecology & the environment.

Roger Revelle [b. Seattle, Washington, March 7, 1909, d. La Jolla, California, July 15, 1991] and Hans Suess [b. Vienna, Austria, 1909, d. 1989] argue that burning fossil fuels has increased atmospheric carbon dioxide. See also 1958 Ecology & the environment.

Scientists establish a link between asbestos and lung cancer. See also 1955 Ecology & the environment.

West German workers manufacturing the herbicide 2, 4, 5-T develop a skin disease later named chloracne; their cases lead to the first recognition that a dioxin frequently contaminates such herbicides. See also 1977 Ecology & the environment.

Large amounts of nuclear waste from a Soviet defense plant explode on September 29 near Kyshtym in the Ural Mountains, contaminating 800 km² (300 sq mi) and causing some 30 towns and villages to be permanently evacuated. See also 1956 Ecology & the environment; 1986 Ecology & the environment.

In October stored nuclear energy in graphite, while undergoing "controlled" release at the Windscale (now Sellafield) nuclear power plant in England, gets out of hand and destroys the core of the reactor, releasing radioactivity into the environment; the British government attempts to suppress news of the accident. See also 1953 Energy; 1979 Ecology & the environment.

Several engineers and scientists leave Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory when William Shockley refuses to allow them to pursue research into silicon transistors. Gordon Moore [b. San Francisco, January 3, 1929], Robert Noyce [b. Burlington, Iowa, December 12, 1927, d. Austin, Texas, June 3, 1990] and others of this group found Fairchild Semiconductor. See also 1954 Electronics; 1958 Electronics.

Prototype rotary engines designed by Felix Wankel are tested in Germany. See also 1929 Energy.

In October the General Electric Boiling Water Reactor, the first power reactor to be supported entirely with private money, starts producing 5000 kW of electricity for the Pacific Gas and Electric grid. See also 1954 Energy.

In December the Shippingport Atomic Power Station, designed and constructed in part by U.S. admiral Hyman Rickover, opens in Pennsylvania, the first commercial nuclear power plant in the United States See also 1954 Energy; 1989 Energy.

Jaroslav Kurzweil, independently from Ralph Henstock, who had suggested a similar idea in 1955, develops the gauge integral, a general definition that is close in concept to the original Riemann integral, but with a firmer logical foundation. See also 1854 Mathematics.

Polish-American microbiologist Albert Bruce Sabin [b. Bialystock, Poland, August 26, 1906, d. Washington, DC, March 3, 1993] develops a polio vaccine based on live, weakened viruses. See also 1952 Medicine & health.

Clarence Lillehei and Earl Bakken [b. Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1924] introduce the external pacemaker for controlling heart action. See also 1956 Medicine & health; 1958 Medicine & health.

Gertrude Elion [b. New York City, January 23, 1918, d. Chapel Hill, North Carolina, February 21, 1999] creates the first immunosuppressant, a drug that suppresses the immune system. See also 1972 Medicine & health.

British virologist Alick Isaacs [b. July 17, 1921, d. January 26, 1967] and Swiss physician Jean Lindenmann discover interferons, natural substances produced by the body that fight viruses. See also 1980 Biology.

The high-speed dental drill is introduced, making it possible to work on teeth painlessly without anesthetics for simple fillings; it is driven by a tiny turbine powered by pressurized air. See also 1872 Medicine & health.

Allan MacLeod Cormack [b. Johannesburg, South Africa, February 23, 1924, d. Winchester, Massachusetts, May 7, 1998], then at the University of Capetown in South Africa, begins development of the CT scan; no one at the time seems interested. See also 1917 Medicine & health; 1960 Medicine & health.

Daniel Bovet of Italy wins the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine for his discovery of antihistamines and work with curare. See also 1937 Medicine & health.

John Bardeen, Leon N. Cooper [b. New York City, February 28, 1930], and John Robert (Bob) Schrieffer [b. Oak Park, Illinois, May 31, 1931] formulate the "BCS theory," which explains superconductivity by assuming the existence of coupled electrons, called Cooper pairs, that cannot undergo scattering by collisions with atoms in the conductor. See also 1911 Physics.

Bruno Pontecorvo [b. Pisa, Italy, August 22, 1913, d. Dubna, Russia, September 24, 1993] first suggests, at Dubna, the existence of neutrino oscillations -- under the right conditions different species of neutrinos might be able to interchange roles, an electron neutrino becoming a muon neutrino, for example. See also 1998 Physics.

The Columbia University Physics Department on January 15 announces that experiments conducted by Chien-Shiung Wu [b. Shanghai, China, May 31, 1912, d. New York City, February 16, 1997] based on theoretical work by Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee show that parity is not conserved for weak interactions (specifically the decay of cobalt-60 differentiates left from right). See also 1956 Physics; 1964 Physics. (See essay.)

Gerhart Lüders [b. 1920, d. 1995] and Wolfgang Pauli prove the CPT theorem, which states that transformation of a particle into an antiparticle leaves the laws of physics intact as long as charge, parity, and time are all reversed (that is, positive becomes negative, right becomes left, and past becomes future, or vice versa). See also 1937 Physics.

Leo Esaki [b. Osaka, Japan, March 12, 1925] discovers that electrons are able to tunnel from one region of a semiconductor to another, bypassing what would ordinarily be a barrier and causing resistance to decrease with increasing current instead of increasing, as would be expected. See also 1928 Physics; 1973 Physics.

In November Julian Schwinger makes the first suggestion that weak interactions are mediated by charged vector bosons, later called W particles. The massive W particles will finally be detected by Carlo Rubbia. See also 1933 Physics; 1983 Physics.

In experiments conducted since 1954, Robert Hofstadter [b. New York City, February 5, 1915, d. Stanford, California, November 17, 1990] discovers that protons and neutrons have a structure. He interprets this as a positive central core surrounded by two shells of mesons, with one of the shells in the neutron being sufficiently negative to make the particle neutral. See also 1961 Physics.

Princeton graduate student Hugh Everett III proposes that quantum theory predicts that anytime a choice is made, the universe splits into two separate universes, one for each branch of the choice. All such universes actually exist, but cannot be in touch with each other after they separate.

Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang of China win the 1957 Nobel Prize for physics for their discovery of violations of the law of conservation of parity. See also 1956 Physics.

Columbia University physics graduate Gordon Gould [b. New York City, July 17, 1920] on November 11 has the idea that will translate into the laser; Gould does not, however, apply for a patent until 1959 and by then others have also begun to work on lasers. Gould's patent claims are not to be accepted until after 1986. See also 1953 Tools; 1958 Tools.

Nikolay Gennadiyevich Basov [b. Usman, Russia, December 14, 1922, d. June 30, 2001] develops molecular oscillators that operate in the optical range, an important precursor of the laser. See also 1964 Physics.

Soviet physicist Aleksandr Prokhorov [b. Atherton, Australia, July 11, 1916, d. Moscow, January 8, 2002] studies the spectrum of light produced by the ruby. This leads to the suggestion of using a ruby to build a laser (which will be the medium employed in the first laser in 1960). See also 1964 Physics.

The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission begins Project Plowshare, officially the Division of Peaceful Nuclear Explosives. Various plans are developed for using nuclear explosions to create harbors, improve mines, and so forth. Because of the dangers of nuclear contamination, very few of these plans are carried out. See also 1954 Tools; 1967 Energy.

The Semyorka intercontinental ballistic missile, designed by Sergei Korolev [b. Zhitomir, Russia, December 30, 1906, d. January 14, 1966], is adapted to launch Sputnik satellites. The first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, is launched by the Soviet Union on October 4; it is about 58 cm (23 in.) in diameter and weighs about 84 kg (184 lb); Sputnik 2 is launched on November 3, carrying the live dog Laika into space (but not bringing her back). Laika lives for ten days, showing that life can survive aboard spacecraft. See also 1687 Transportation.

The U.S. Transportation Department orders air bags for all new U.S. cars to be installed by the 1975 model year (later changed to 1977). See also 1953 Transportation.

Drama and Theater

• Jerome Chodorov and Joseph Fields: The Ponder Heart. The veteran playwrights base their play on Eudora Welty's 1954 comic fantasy, about life in a small Mississippi town. Despite an engaging story revolving around a bride's suspected murder by her husband, it receives mixed reviews and a short run on the New York stage.
• Ketti Frings (1910-1981): Look Homeward, Angel. Frings's adaptation of Thomas Wolfe's 1929 novel earns the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. It is her only drama success. Frings was a Hollywood screenwriter who wrote the film adaptation of William Inge's Come Back, Little Sheba in 1952.
• William Inge: The Dark at the Top of the Stairs. Inge's somber drama presents a lower-middle-class Midwestern family during the 1920s, torn apart by economic forces, sexual trauma, and violence. The play is characteristic of the playwright's ability to endow presumably simple small-town American characters with psychological and emotional depth.
• Arthur Laurents: West Side Story. This musical update of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, set in New York's tenements and reflecting gang conflict between whites and Puerto Ricans, is a landmark work in the history of the American musical. It features music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and choreography by Jerome Robbins. Some initial reviewers complain that the play's violence and realism are inappropriate for a musical, while others praise these innovations.
• Carson McCullers: The Square Root of Wonderful. McCullers's final play reflects her attempt to cope with the suicide of her husband and death of her mother. The play closes after only forty-five performances, and its failure prompts McCullers to abandon drama.
• Eugene O'Neill: A Moon for the Misbegotten. Having failed in its out-of-town tryout in 1947, O'Neill's drama finally reaches Broadway for a disappointingly short run of sixty-eight performances. The play would be subsequently hailed as one of O'Neill's masterpieces in more successful productions in 1968 and 1973.
• William Saroyan: The Cave Dwellers. Saroyan's last play to appear on Broadway is an allegorical fantasy about several refugees "from the obvious" who take shelter in an abandoned theater slated for demolition. Showing clearly the influence of postwar French drama, particularly the works of Samuel Beckett, the play prompts critic Harold Clurman to label it "sugared existentialism."
• Gore Vidal: Visit to a Small Planet. Vidal's first stage success, originally a television drama broadcast in 1955, is a whimsical satire about an extraterrestrial's perspective on modern life on earth.
• Tennessee Williams: Orpheus Descending. Williams reworks and retitles his earlier play, Battle of Angels (1940), about lust and hatred in a small Southern town.
• Meredith Willson (1902-1984): The Music Man. Drawing on the former band leader and composer's memories of boyhood in Iowa, the musical presents the machinations of a con man who convinces the inhabitants of River City to outfit a town band. The nostalgic celebration of small-town American life wins both the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the Tony Award for best musical, edging out West Side Story.

Fiction

• James Agee: A Death in the Family. Agee's unfinished novel details how the sudden death of Jay Follett in an auto accident plunges his once-happy family into chaos. Based on Agee's own experience following his father's death, the novel concentrates on six-year-old Rufus, who is thrust prematurely into an understanding of matters such as existence and faith. The work wins the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1960 Tad Mosel (b. 1922) would adapt it for the stage as All the Way Home, another Pulitzer Prize winner.
• Ann Bannon (b. 1937): Odd Girl Out. The first of a series of lesbian "pulps," paperback original novels featuring a rotating set of female characters and their romantic entanglements. "Ann Bannon" is the pseudonym of Ann Weldy, an author widely credited with creating a sense of community among lesbians in the 1950s and early 1960s, when lesbian life was covert and plagued by prejudice. Odd Girl Out proves enormously popular, as would its sequels, and the entire series would be reissued in the 1970s and again in the 1980s.
• Harold Brodkey (1930-1996): First Love and Other Stories. Brodkey's first collection is a linked sequence on the progression of youthful love and its many compromises. The stories are widely praised for their control and perceptiveness. Brodkey's subsequent collections include Women and Angels (1985) and Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (1988). Born in Illinois, Brodkey worked as a staff writer for The New Yorker beginning in 1953 when it published his first short story, "State of Grace."
• John Cheever: The Wapshot Chronicle. Cheever's first novel follows the fortunes of a New England family, loosely based on Cheever's own, skillfully contrasting happy family rituals with darker portraits of modern American life. It wins Cheever a National Book Award; a sequel, The Wapshot Scandal, would follow in 1964.
• James Gould Cozzens: By Love Possessed. Cozzens's novel about a conservative, middle-aged lawyer's recollections of his love life becomes a bestseller, employing as narrator a mature professional man capable of dispassionately assessing society's foibles while at the same time acquiescing to them.
• W.E.B. Du Bois: The Ordeal of Mansart. Volume one of Du Bois's The Black Flame trilogy offers his version of American history from Reconstruction to the present. It would be followed by Mansart Builds a School (1959) and Worlds of Color (1961).
• William Faulkner: The Town. The second installment of Faulkner's Snopes trilogy appears seventeen years after the first volume, The Hamlet (1940). The novel focuses on an outsider, the lawyer Gavin Stevens, and his naive longing for two of the Snopes women. Narration by another outsider, the itinerant sewing machine salesman V. K. Ratliff, integrates The Town with its predecessor in the trilogy. The set would be completed with the 1960 publication of The Mansion.
• Chester B. Himes: For Love of Imabelle. The first of the nine detective novels Himes would write up to 1969. They feature the black police detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones in a violent, almost surrealistic Harlem setting. Other novels in the series include The Real Cool Killers (1959), Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965), and Blind Man with a Pistol (1969).
• James Jones: Some Came Running. Jones's second novel is a nonmilitary follow-up to From Here to Eternity, concerning postwar life in a small Midwestern town. The book is a commercial success but a critical failure; reviewers object to its long-winded philosophizing. One reviewer calls it "a 1,200 page orgy of sex, self-pity, and sloppy prose."
• Jack Kerouac: On the Road. Kerouac's first-person roman à clef, written in 1951 and frequently revised, finally appears, transforming its author into the chief chronicler of the Beat generation. Initially produced by "spontaneous writing" on a roll of teletype, the book is, Kerouac asserts, intended as a jazz composition. It tells the story of the friendship between two men and their cross-country journeys. On the Road becomes a best-selling cult classic.
• C. Y. Lee (b. 1917): The Flower Drum Song. Lee's novel about generational conflict within an Asian American family over an arranged marriage in San Francisco's Chinatown would be adapted into a musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein in 1958. Born in China, Lee came to the United States in 1942. His other books include Lover's Point (1958), Madame Goldenflower (1960), The Second Son of Heaven (1990), and Gate of Rage (1991).
• Bernard Malamud: The Assistant. Set in the Brooklyn grocery of a struggling Jewish immigrant, the novel mirrors Malamud's own background. Many regard its story of reverse assimilation, in which a grocer's assistant takes up both his employer's position and his religion after the older man's death, as Malamud's most significant work.
• Wright Morris: Love Among the Cannibals. Two Hollywood songwriters pick up two young women and take them to Acapulco for an encounter with the primitive. A departure for Morris, the novel employs a cynical first-person narrator to focus on contemporary life.
• Vladimir Nabokov: Pnin. Drawing on his own college teaching experience, Nabokov presents a satirical look at American higher education and campus social mores from the perspective of an émigré Russian professor at an upstate New York college. Some consider the protagonist one of the most endearing characters in modern fiction.
• Howard Nemerov: The Homecoming Game. Nemerov's third and final novel is a comedy about a professor who fails a star football player on the eve of an important game. The writer's most conventional work and biggest success, it would be dramatized by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse as Tall Story in 1959.
• John Okada (1923-1971): No-No Boy. Okada's only published work, and the first Japanese American novel published in the United States, depicts a Nisei (person born of Japanese immigrants to America) who resists the draft during World War II and the racism experienced by Japanese Americans during and after the war. The novel rejects the image of the docile "model minority," recording the self-hatred, uncertainty, and divisions within the Japanese American community. Largely ignored at the time, it would be subsequently recognized as a classic work of Asian American literature.
• Ayn Rand: Atlas Shrugged. Rand dramatizes the efforts of five heroic figures to save America from socialism. Dismissed by critics as a "polemic inadequately disguised as a novel," the book becomes a bestseller and contributes to Rand's cult status.
• James Salter (b. 1925): The Hunters. Salter's first novel deals with the author's experiences as a fighter pilot in Korea. When reissued in 1997, it would prompt the Times Literary Supplement reviewer to describe it as a "brisk, controlled novel, written on titanic lines. As other books of its era have fallen away, this one turns out to be a classic." Salter graduated from West Point and pursued an air force career until 1957.
• John Steinbeck: The Short Reign of Pippin IV. Steinbeck's unusual departure is a limp satire on French politics, which imagines the restoration of the monarchy in the twentieth century.

Literary Criticism and Scholarship

• Richard Chase (1914-1962): The American Novel and Its Tradition. Chase's analysis has long served as a paradigm-making critique of the American novel, distinguishing it from European fiction by its preference for romance over realism.
• T. S. Eliot: On Poetry and Poets. The volume collects Eliot's major criticism from the 1940s and 1950s, including "The Music of Poetry," a central document for the New Criticism, and "Poetry and Drama," which supplies Eliot's definition of and justification for his poetic drama.
• Irving Howe (1920-1993): Politics and the Novel. Having published a critical biography of Sherwood Anderson (1951) and a critical study of William Faulkner (1952), Howe contributes an important summary work on American literature, with chapters on Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry Adams, and an influential general study, "Some American Novelists: The Politics of Isolation." Howe, a professor of English at Hunter College from 1963 to 1986, frequently contributed literary and social essays to the Partisan Review. He is best known for his social history of New York Jewish life, World of Our Fathers (1976).
• Yvor Winters: The Function of Criticism: Problems and Exercises. The essay collection includes important assessments of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Robert Frost.

Nonfiction

• Noam Chomsky (b. 1928): Syntactic Structures. The scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology introduces ideas about language that transform the study of linguistics, human language, and communication. Several important works, expanding his views, would follow; they include Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (1964), Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), Topics in the Theory of Generative Grammar (1966), and Sound Patterns in English (1968). Chomsky's concept of "transformational grammar", that it was possible to predict sentence combinations in a language and to describe their structure, in the words of critic John Lyons, "revolutionized the scientific study of language".
• Leon Festinger (1919-1989): A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. The psychologist's most famous work presents his influential assertion that contradictory beliefs, held simultaneously, result in irrational behavior.
• Jean Kerr (1923-2003): Please Don't Eat the Daisies. This is the first and the best of Kerr's whimsical accounts of "suburban housewifery" of the period. The Snake Has All the Lines (1960) and How I Got to Be Perfect (1978) would follow. Kerr was the wife of drama critic Walter Kerr (1913-1996), with whom she collaborated in an adaptation of Franz Werfel's The Song of Bernadette (1946) and the musical comedy Goldilocks (1948).
• Art Linkletter (b. 1912): Kids Say the Darndest Things! The first of the popular television personality's best-selling collections of amusing comments made by children, whom he interviewed on his television program.
• Dwight MacDonald (1906-1982): Memoirs of a Revolutionist. The volume collects MacDonald's political criticism, which modulates widely across the political spectrum, from pacifism to Trotskyism to anti-Communism. MacDonald describes his personal ideology as "conservative anarchist". After founding the journal Politics (1944-1949) as a platform for his anarchist and pacifist views, MacDonald became a staff writer for The New Yorker in 1952.
• Norman Mailer: "The White Negro." Mailer's essay attempts to trace the source of the "destructive, the liberating, the creative nihilism of the Hip" to African American experience, defining how the "psychic outlaw" opposes social and political repression. Regarded as one of the significant cultural documents of the period, it appears in Dissent, which Mailer edits, and would later be included in Advertisements for Myself (1959).
• Mary McCarthy: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. One of McCarthy's most admired works, this series of autobiographical sketches depicts her upbringing by two sets of grandparents from different religious backgrounds after her parents died in the influenza epidemic of 1918. She would continue her recollections in How I Grew (1987).
• Henry Miller: Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch. Miller treats his years living on the California coast as a sage of human liberation, expressed in a combination of anecdotes and ruminations. The most sustained narrative of the book, describing a visit by an eccentric astrologer, had been previously published as A Devil in Paradise in 1956.
• Vance Packard (1914-1996): The Hidden Persuaders. The first of Packard's best-selling popular sociological studies of contemporary American business practices deals with advertising and its reliance on research and subliminal messages to reach consumers. Its sequels are The Status Seekers (1959) and The Waste Makers (1960). Packard was a staff writer and editor for American magazine from 1942 to 1956 and has been described as "our most popular popularizer of sociology", and by William Barrett as "a blend of amateur sociologist and crusading journalist".
• Richard Wright: Pagan Spain and White Man, Listen! The first of Wright's two prose works of 1957 is a bitter series of impressions he gathered while touring Spain, then under the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco. The second, Wright's last book of nonfiction, consists of lectures delivered between 1950 and 1956 throughout Europe, recapitulating his ideas about race. Included is "The Literature of the Negro in the United States," a survey of African American writing.

Poetry

• Donald Hall, Robert Pack (b. 1929), and Louis Simpson, editors: The New Poets of England and America. With an introduction by Robert Frost, this influential anthology introduces the public to many of the most significant contemporary poets. A second edition would appear in 1962.
• Denise Levertov (1923-1997): Here and Now. Having published her first collection, The Double Image (1946), in England before immigrating to America in 1948, Levertov issues her second collection with the clear intention to be regarded as an American poet. The work, like the two that would immediately follow it--Five Poems (1958) and Overland the Islands (1958)--shows the influences of William Carlos Williams and methods derived from the Black Mountain poets, such as Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Robert Creeley.
• Howard Moss: A Swimmer in the Air. Moss's third collection contains one of his most admired poems, "A Summer Gone," concerning the passing of time, death, and change. Other poems, such as "Horror Movie," show the poet's witty wordplay.
• Frank O'Hara (1926-1966): Meditations in an Emergency. After two of his earlier collections--A City Winter and Other Poems (1952) and Oranges (1953)--had been published by a New York City art gallery, O'Hara's third collection reaches a wider audience and establishes him as one of the leading exponents of the New York school of poetry. Born in Baltimore, O'Hara was a member of the staff of the Museum of Modern Art from 1951 until his death; from 1953 to 1956 he was an editor, reviewer, and writer for Art News.
• Kenneth Patchen: Hurrah for Anything. Jazz influence is evident in this collection of poems, with each verse forming a kind of jazz riff, accompanied by a drawing by the author. Patchen also publishes an enlarged edition of his Selected Poems and a volume of prose poems, Here Together.
• Wallace Stevens: Opus Posthumous. This posthumously published miscellany includes plays, essays, notebook entries, and some previously uncollected and unpublished poems, including "Adagia," a collection of aphorisms on poetry and the imagination.
• Robert Penn Warren: Promises: Poems 1954-1956. Warren's collection, which marks a shift in style from narrative to personal introspection, receives both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. It includes the powerful sequence "Ballad of a Sweet Dream of Peace."
• James Wright (1927-1980): The Green Wall. Wright's first collection, selected by W. H. Auden as part of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, shows the influence of Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson as well as his characteristic fascination with outcast figures, including mental patients, prostitutes, and lesbians. One of the major works is "A Poem About George Doty in the Death House." Wright was born in Ohio, a Kenyon College graduate who received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington, and taught at the University of Minnesota, Macalester College, and Hunter College.

Publications and Events

• James Wright (1927-1980)Evergreen Review. This influential literary magazine, published until 1973, featured avant-garde American and world fiction, poetry, drama, criticism, interviews, and photographs. During the 1970s it focused on liberal politics, civil liberties, and the counterculture. Contributors included Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Denise Levertov.