1940's: Overview - About | Important Events of the 1940s

1940

Movies: Doctor Ehrlich's Magic Bullet, starring Edward G. Robinson; Fantasia, Walt Disney feature-length animation; Foreign Correspondent, directed by Alfred Hitchcock; The Grapes of Wrath, starring Henry Fonda, directed by John Ford; The Great Dictator, directed by and starring Charlie Chaplin; Knute Rockne, All-American, starring Ronald Reagan; The Mortal Storm, starring Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullivan; My Little Chickadee, starring W. C. Fields and Mae West; The Philadelphia Story, starring Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and Jimmy Stewart; Rebecca, starring Laurence Olivier, directed by Alfred Hitchcock; The Road to Singapore, starring Bob Hope and Bing Crosby; The Thief of Baghdad, starring Sabu and Conrad Veidt.
Fiction: Erskine Caldwell, Trouble in July; Willa Cather, Sapphira and the Slave Girl; Walter von Tilburg Clark, The Ox-Bow Incident; William Faulkner, The Hamlet; Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls; Sinclair Lewis, Bethel Merriday; Richard Llewellyn, How Green Was My Valley; Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter; Upton Sinclair, World's End; William Carlos Williams, In the Money; Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again (published posthumously); Richard Wright, Native Son.
Popular Songs: "Along the Santa Fe Trail," Glenn Miller and his Orchestra with Ray Eberly; "Amapola," Jimmy Dorsey and his Orchestra; "Boog-it," Cab Calloway and his Orchestra; "Can't Get Indiana Off My Mind," Kate Smith; "Devil May Care," Bing Crosby; "Dream Valley," Sammy Kaye and his Orchestra; "I Can't Love You Any More," Benny Goodman with Helen Forrest; "In an Old Dutch Garden," Glenn Miller and his Orchestra; "Java Jive," The Ink Spots; "Just to Ease My Worried Mind," Roy Acuff; "Love Lies," Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra with Frank Sinatra; "Practice Makes Perfect," Bob Chester and his Orchestra; "San Antonio Rose," Bing Crosby; "Strange Fruit," Billie Holliday; "Trade Winds," Bing Crosby; "We Three," The Ink Spots; "Well All Right!," The Andrews Sisters.
26 Jan.: The Italian Art Masterpiece exhibit opens at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It is the first time most of the work is shown in the United States.
3 Feb.: President Franklin D. Roosevelt pledges his support to the $1-million drive to save the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.
14 May: A Mexican art exhibit covering two thousand years of Mexican history opens at the Museum of Modern Art.
12 June: American artists vote to withdraw from the Venice Art Exhibit because of the war.
13 Oct.: Benny Goodman signs a contract to play with the New York Philharmonic.
22 Oct.: Piet Mondrian arrives in New York, in exile from the war in Europe.
31 Oct.: The Hollywood film industry pledges facilities to produce army training films.
13 Nov.: Fantasia opens in New York with Leopold Stokowski conducting the orchestra.
14 Nov.: The American Academy of Arts and Letters gives the Howells Medal for Fiction to Ellen Glasgow for the most distinguished work of the past five years.
18 Nov.: A giant "battle of the swing bands," featuring twenty-eight of the biggest bands in the country and lasting from eight in the evening to four in the morning, is held at New York's Manhattan Center.
21 Dec.: F. Scott Fitzgerald, age forty-four, dies in Hollywood.

1941

Movies: Buck Privates, starring Abbott and Costello; Citizen Kane, directed by and starring Orson Welles; Dumbo, Walt Disney film; The Great Lie, starring Mary As tor and Bette Davis; High Sierra, starring Humphrey Bogart; Hold That Ghost, starring Abbott and Costello; How Green Was My Valley, directed by John Ford, starring Donald Crisp; The Maltese Falcon, directed by John Huston, starring Humphrey Bogart; Meet John Doe, directed by Frank Capra; Sergeant York, starring Gary Cooper; Suspicion, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine; The Two-Faced Woman, starring Greta Garbo.
Fiction: William Attaway, Blood on the Forge; A. J. Cronin, The Keys of the Kingdom; Edna Ferber, Saratoga Trunk; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon (published posthumously); Ellen Glasgow, In This Our Life; James Hilton, Random Harvest; Carson McCullers, Reflections in a Golden Eye; John P. Marquand, H. M. Pulham, Esq.; Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight; Robert Nathan, They Went Together; William Saroyan, Fables; Upton Sinclair, Between Two Worlds; Marguerite Steen, The Sun Is My Undoing.
Popular Songs: "Absent Minded Moon." Jimmy Dorsey with Bob Eberly, "Aurora," The Andrews Sisters; "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy," The Andrews Sisters; "By-U, By-O," Woody Herman and his Orchestra with Muriel Lane; "Confessin' the Blues," Jay McShann and his Orchestra; "Everything Happens to Me," Tommy Dorsey with Frank Sinatra; "Frenesí," Artie Shaw and his Orchestra; "Hawaiian Sunset," Sammy Kaye with Marty McKenna; "The Hut-Sut Song," Freddie Martin and his Orchestra; "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire," The Mills Brothers; "I Wonder Why You Said Goodbye," Ernest Tubb; "Jump For Joy," Duke Ellington with Herb Jeffries; "Maria Elena," Jimmy Dorsey with Bob Eberly, "This Love of Mine," Tommy Dorsey with Frank Sinatra; "Til Reveille," Bing Crosby; "When My Blue Moon Turns Gold Again," Gene Autry.
4 Jan.: Charlie Chaplin declines the New York Film Critics' Circle Award, saying that actors should not compete with one another.
10 Jan.: James Joyce dies in Zurich.
16 Jan.: Will Hays denies Sen. Burton Wheeler's charge that the film industry is interventionist.
27 Jan.: William Randolph Hearst's art collection, of some ten thousand items, is put on private display in New York.
10 Feb.: Paramount Pictures purchases screen rights to Lady in the Dark for a record price of $283,000.
17 Mar.: President Roosevelt opens the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
28 Mar.: Virginia Woolf drowns herself in Lewes, Sussex, England.
2 May: The Federal Communication Commission (FCC) authorizes full commercialization of television broadcasting to begin 1 July.
6 June: The American Writers' Congress presents the Randolph Bourne Memorial Award for "distinguished service to the cause and culture of peace" to Theodore Dreiser.
1 Sept.-26 Sept.: The congressional committee chaired by Sen. Gerald Nye investigates Hollywood's "interventionist propaganda."
15 Oct.: Sculptor Jo Davidson says the United States is on the verge of an art renaissance due to Works Progress Administration (WPA) art projects.

1942

Movies: Casablanca, starring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, and Paul Henreid; The Glass Key, starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake; In Which We Serve, written by Noel Coward; Johnny Eager, starring Robert Taylor and Van Heflin; The Magnificent Amber sons, directed by Orson Welles; Mrs. Miniver, starring Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon, directed by William Wyler; The Pied Piper, starring Anne Baxter; Pride of the Yankees, starring Gary Cooper; Random Harvest, starring Ronald Colman and Greer Garson; Road to Morocco, starring Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour; This Gun for Hire, starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake; Wake Island, starring William Bendix; Woman of the Year, starring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy; Yankee Doodle Dandy, starring James Cagney.
Fiction: Nelson Algren, Never Come Morning; Louis Bromfield, Until the Daybreak, Pearl S. Buck, Dragon Seed; James Gould Cozzens, The just and the Unjust; Marcia Davenport, Valley of Decision', William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses; Rachel Field, And Now Tomorrow; Nancy Hale, The Prodigal Woman; Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on the Road; John Steinbeck, The Moon Is Down; Eudora Welty, The Robber Bridegroom; Franz Werfel, The Song of Bernadette.
Popular Songs: "All I Need Is You," Dinah Shore; "Back to Donegal," Bing Crosby; "Day-break," Tommy Dorsey with Frank Sinatra; "Der Fuehrer's Face," Spike Jones and his Band; "I Had the Craziest Dream," Harry James with Helen Forrest; "I Lost My Sugar in Salt Lake City," Johnny Mercer; "I'll Always Be Glad to Take You Back," Ernest Tubb; "I'll Be Around," The Mills Brothers; "It Won't Be Long," Roy Acuff; "The Lamplighter's Serenade," Glenn Miller with Ray Eberly; "Lonely River," Gene Autry; "Lover Man," Billie Holliday; "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition," Kay Kyser and his Orchestra; "Private Buckeroo," Gene Autry; "Strip Polka," The Andrews Sisters; "Take Me," Tommy Dorsey with Frank Sinatra; "When the Lights Go On Again," Vaughn Monroe and his Orchestra; "White Christmas," Bing Crosby.
16 Jan.: Carole Lombard, her mother, and twenty others die in a plane crash near Las Vegas.
8 Feb.: Mark Rothko holds his first solo exhibition at the Artists' Gallery in New York.
3 Mar.: John Cage's Imaginary Landscape No. 3, a percussive orchestral piece, is premiered at the Chicago Arts Club.
6 Mar.: Artists in Exile exhibit begins at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in Manhattan.
9 Apr.: In Madison Square Garden Igor Stravinsky's Circus Polka debuts with the Ringling Brothers circus. The ballet that accompanies the music is performed by fifty elephants and fifty showgirls and is choreographed by George Balanchine.
16 Apr.: The New York Drama Critics' Circle gives no award for best play of 1941-1942 season.
28 Apr.: 20th Century-Fox buys rights to The Moon Is Down for a record three hundred thousand dollars.
2 May: Aaron Copland's Lincoln Portrait premieres, played by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Andre Kostelanetz, directing; William Adams, narrator.
4 July: This Is the Army, a soldier revue with a cast of three hundred army men, opens at a Broadway theater in New York.
8 July: James Petrillo, president of the American Federation of Musicians, announces a ban on recording because of a dispute with American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP).
1 Aug.: The American Federation of Musicians, led by president James C. Petrillo, begins its yearlong strike against the recording industry.
3 Sept.: The World at War, a film survey written and produced by the Office of War Information, opens in New York.
23 Sept.: A Dial Press poll names Carl Sandburg the "greatest living American writer." Ernest Hemingway and Willa Cather finished second and third.
22 Oct.: The Art of This Century Gallery opens in New York.
26 Oct.: Agnes de Mille's ballet, Rodeo, premieres in New York, danced by the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo and featuring a score composed by Aaron Copland.
18 Nov.: Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth opens in New York.
25 Dec.: A Motion Picture Herald poll shows Abbott and Costello as the leading box-office attraction of 1942.
31 Dec.: Roy Harris's Symphony no. 4 (Folksong) is performed for the first time by the New York Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra and New York High School Choruses, directed by Dimitri Mitropoulos.

1943

Movies: Action in the North Atlantic, starring Humphrey Bogart; For Whom the Bell Tolls, starring Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman; Guadalcanal Diary, starring William Bendix; Hitlers Children, starring Robert Watson and Tim Holt; The Human Comedy, starring Mickey Rooney and Frank Morgan; Mission to Moscow, starring Walter Huston; Mr. Lucky, starring Cary Grant; The North Star, written by Lillian Hellman; The Outlaw, starring Jane Russell; The Ox-Bow Incident, directed by William Wellman, starring Henry Fonda; Since You Went Away, starring Claudette Colbert and Jennifer Jones; Song of Bernadette, starring Jennifer Jones; Stormy Weather, starring Lena Horne; Tender Comrade, starring Ginger Rogers, screenplay by Dalton Trumbo; Victory Through Air Power, Walt Disney Studios; Watch on the Rhine, starring Paul Lukas and Bette Davis.
Fiction: Sholem Asch, The Apostle; Louis Bromfield, Mrs. Parkington; Erskine Caldwell, Georgia Boy; John Cheever, The Way Some People Live; John Dos Passos, Number One; James T. Farrell, My Days of Anger; Arthur Koestler, Arrival and Departure; Sinclair Lewis, Gideon Planish; John P. Marquand, So Little Time; William Saroyan, The Human Comedy; Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn; Wallace Stegner, The Big Rock Candy Mountain; Robert Penn Warren, At Heavens Gate; Eudora Welty, The Wide Net.
Popular Songs: "Comin' In on a Wing and a Prayer," The Song Spinners; "Don't Believe Everything You Dream," The Ink Spots; "Don't Sweetheart Me," Lawrence Welk and his Orchestra with Wayne Marsh; "G.I. Jive," Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five; "Goodbye Sue," Perry Como; "Home in San Antone," Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys; "Hot Time in the Town of Berlin," Bing Crosby; "I'll Be Home for Christmas," Bing Crosby; "I' ve Had This Feeling Before," Johnny Long and his Orchestra; "Johnny Zero," The Song Spinners; "The Prodigal Son," Roy Acuff; "Rainbow Rhapsody," Glenn Miller and his Orchestra; "Rusty Dusty Blues," Count Basie and his Orchestra with Jimmy Rushing; "That Ain't Right," The King Cole Trio; "Travelin' Light," Billie Holiday; "Velvet Moon," Harry James and his Orchestra.
18 Jan.: The Whitney Museum of Art announces it will consolidate with the Museum of Modern Art.
7 Feb.: John Cage performs compositions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, including First Construction and Amores.
14 Mar.: Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man debuts with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Eugene Goossens.
30 Mar.: Oklahoma! opens in New York.
16 Apr.: The Book-of-the-Month Club reveals it has been pressured by the Daily Worker to suppress publication of an English translation of Mark Aldanov's anti-Soviet novel The Fifth Seal.
5 May: Howard Walls, the curator for the Library of Congress's new film collection, announces plans to restore five thousand pictures made between 1897 and 1917.
5 June: Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit closes in New York after 650 performances.
19 Sept.: Decca Records reaches an agreement with the American Federation of Musicians, becoming the only record label currently recording.
20 Oct.: The Juilliard School of Music announces Benny Goodman will conduct a five-week clarinet course in popular and classical music.
4 Nov.: Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony is given a world premiere in Moscow.
9 Nov.: Jackson Pollock's first solo show opens at the Art of This Century Gallery.
7 Dec.: Carmen Jones, a musical comedy by Oscar Hammerstein II, based on Georges Bizet's Carmen, opens in New York with an all-black cast.
9 Dec.: Frank Sinatra is declared 4-F, unable to fight in World War II because of a punctured eardrum.

1944

Movies: Double Indemnity, directed by Billy Wilder; The Fighting Seabees, starring John Wayne; Gaslight, starring Ingrid Bergman; Going My Way, starring Bing Crosby; Hail the Conquering Hero, directed by Preston Sturges; Henry V, directed by and starring Laurence Olivier; Laura, starring Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews; Lifeboat, directed by Alfred Hitchcock; Meet Me in St. Louis, starring Judy Garland and Margaret O'Brien; National Velvet, starring Elizabeth Taylor; Since You Went Away, starring Claudette Colbert and Joseph Cotten; Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, starring Van Johnson, screenplay by Dalton Trumbo; To Have and Have Not, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacali; Up In Arms, starring Danny Kaye; Wilson, starring Alexander Knox.
Fiction: Saul Bellow, Dangling Man; Kay Boyle, Avalanche; Harry Brown, A Walk in the Sun; Erskine Caldwell, Tragic Ground; A. J. Cronin, The Green Years; Isak Dinesen, Winter Tales; Howard Fast, Freedom Road; John Hersey, A Bell for Adano; Charles Jackson, The Lost Weekend; D. H. Lawrence, The First Lady Chatterley; Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge; Anaïs Nin, Under a Glass Bell; Katherine Anne Porter, The Leaning Tower and Other Stories; Jean Stafford, Boston Adventure; Lillian Smith, Strange Fruit.
Popular Songs: "Accent-tchuate the Positive," The Andrews Sisters; "Be-bop," Dizzy Gillespie; "Blues in My Mind," Roy Acuff; "Each Minute Seems a Million Years," Eddy Arnold; "G.I. Blues," Floyd Tillman; "Gonna Build a Big Fence Around Texas," Gene Autry, "Good, Good, Good," Xavier Cougat and his Orchestra; "Groovin High," Dizzy Gillespie; "I Can't See For Lookin'," The King Cole Trio; "I'm Making Believe," Ella Fitzgerald; "Just a Prayer Away," Bing Crosby; "Little Brown Book," Duke Ellington and his Orchestra; "Sentimental Journey," Les Brown and his Orchestra with Doris Day, "Solo Flight," Benny Goodman and his Orchestra; "That Ole Devil Called Love," Billie Holiday; "You Always Hurt the One You Love," The Mills Brothers.
1 Feb.: Piet Mondrian dies in New York.
20 Mar.: The Boston Board of Retail Merchants bans the sale of Lillian Smith's novel Strange Fruit.
2 Apr.: Shostakovich's Symphony no. 8 is played by the U.S. Philharmonic in Carnegie Hall.
10 Apr.: The First Lady Chatterley by D. H. Lawrence is published in New York.
2 May: The Museum of Modern Art purchases its first works by Jackson Pollock (The She-Wolf) and Robert Motherwell (Pancho Villa Dead and Alive).
14 May: Strange Fruit is banned from the mails by the United States Postal Service.
29 May: New York magistrate Charles G. Kentgen declares Lawrence's The First Lady Chatterley obscene and orders Dial Press to trial.
17 June: Arsenic and Old Lace closes on Broadway after 1,444 performances.
7 Aug.: The Justice Department files suit ordering motion-picture producers to end theater ownership and restore competition.
1 Sept.: Helsinki reports the original manuscripts of Jean Sibelius destroyed in an Allied bombing of Leipzig.
1 Nov.: Justices Nathan D. Perman and George DeLucca rule that The First Lady Chatterley is not obscene.
15 Dec.: Glenn Miller dies in a plane crash, traveling from London to Paris.
16 Dec.: Boston police arrest a bookseller for selling Erskine Caldwell's Tragic Ground.
28 Dec.: Judge Elijah Adlow rules in Boston that Tragic Ground is not obscene.

1945

Movies: Anchors Aweigh, starring Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly; The Bells of St. Mary's, starring Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman; The Lost Weekend, starring Ray Milland and Jane Wyman; Mildred Pierce, starring Joan Crawford; Objective Burma, starring Errol Flynn; The Picture of Dorian Gray, directed by Albert Lewin; Spellbound, starring Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman; The Story of G.I. Joe, starring Burgess Meredith; They Were Expendable, directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne; A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, directed by Elia Kazan; The Woman in the Window, directed by Fritz Lang.
Fiction: Nancy Bruff, The Manatee; T. B. Costain, The Black Rose; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack Up (published posthumously, edited by Edmund Wilson); Chester Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go; Sinclair Lewis, Cass Timberlane; John P. Marquand, Repent in Haste; George Orwell, Animal Farm; John Steinbeck, Cannery Row; Irving Stone, The Immortal Wife; James Ramsey Ullman, The White Tower; Jessamyn West, The Friendly Persuasion; Richard Wright, Black Boy.
Popular Songs: "All That Glitters Is Not Gold," Dinah Shore; "Beulah's Boogie," Lionel Hampton and his Orchestra; "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie," Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five; "Gotta Be This or That," Benny Goodman and his Orchestra; "The Gypsy," The Ink Spots; "Her Bathing Suit Never Got Wet," The Andrews Sisters; "Homesick - That's All," Frank Sinatra; "I Think I'll Go Home and Cry," Roy Acuff; "I'll Be Back," Gene Autry; "I'm Tired," Private Cecil Grant; "Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!" Vaughn Monroe and his Orchestra; "Till the End of Time," Perry Como; "Waitin' for the Train to Come In," Peggy Lee.
28 Mar.: W. H. Auden wins the American Academy of Arts and Letters poetry prize.
31 Mar.: Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie opens on Broadway.
8 Apr.: The U.S. Senate's Small Business Committee begins an investigation of the motion picture studios' monopoly that forces independents out of business.
5 May: Ezra Pound is arrested by U.S. armed forces in Genoa on charges that he made treasonous radio broadcasts from Italy during the war.
21 May: Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacali marry in Mansfield, Ohio.
30 Oct.: Martha Graham's modern dance, Appalachian Spring, debuts in Washington, D.C., with music composed by Aaron Copland.
11 Nov.: Metropolitan Museum of Art director William C. Osborn announces plans for a $10-million construction program.
26 Dec.: Bernard Shaw proposes a new phonetic alphabet with only one sign for each sound in the English language.

1946

Movies: Anna and the King of Siam, starring Irene Dunn and Rex Harrison; The Best Years of Our Lives, directed by William Wyler; The Big Sleep, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacali; The Blue Dahlia, starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake; Brief Encounter, directed by David Lean; Henry V, directed by and starring Laurence Olivier; It's a Wonderful Life, directed by Frank Capra, starring Jimmy Stewart; Notorious, directed by Alfred Hitchcock; The Postman Always Rings Twice, starring John Garfield and Lana Turner; The Razor's Edge, starring Tyrone Power; The Stranger, directed by Orson Welles; To Each His Own, starring Olivia de Havilland; The Yearling, starring Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman.
Fiction: Kay Boyle, Thirty Stories; Taylor Caldwell, This Side of Innocence; Daphne Du Maurier, The Kings General; Pat Frank, Mr. Adam; Alfred Hays, All Thy Conquests; Francis Parkinson Keys, River Road; Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding; Erich Marie Remarque, The Arch of Triumph;]. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye; Robert Penn Warren, All the Kings Men; Eudora Welty, Delta Wedding; William Carlos Williams, The Build Up; Edmund Wilson, Memoirs of Hecate County.
Popular Songs: "All Alone in the World," Eddy Arnold; "Atomic Power," The Buchanan Brothers; "The Christmas Song," Nat King Cole; "Coax Me a Little Bit," The Andrews Sisters; "The Frim Fram Sauce," Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong; "A Hundred and Sixty Acres," Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters; "Kentucky Waltz," Bill Monroe; "Laughing on the Outside," Dinah Shore; "Long Time Gone," Tex Ritter; "No One to Cry To," The Sons of the Pioneers; One-Z Two-Z I Love You-Z," Phil Harris and his Orchestra; "Rainbow at Mid-night," Ernest Tubb; "Route 66!" The King Cole Trio; "Something Old, Something New," Frank Sinatra; "Sonata," Perry Como.
3 Jan.: Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited is published in New York.
20 Feb.: The Daughters of the American Revolution ban Eddie Condon's jazz band from Constitution Hall because of "the type of audience which would attend."
13 Mar.: Bennett Cerf agrees to include twelve Ezra Pound poems in the new edition of An Anthology of Famous English and American Poetry after first announcing that none would be included.
30 Mar.: A poll of the Metropolitan Opera Guild's 123,000 listeners reveals their favorite operas as Aida, Carmen, La Traviata, Hansel and Gretel, and Boris Godunov.
30 Mar.: Critic Robert Coates uses the term Abstract Expressionism to describe the New York modernists.
14 Apr.: The first film to have a world premiere aboard a scheduled airline flight, So Goes My Love, is shown on a PanAm clipper from New York to Ireland.
1 July: Oklahoma! breaks the record for the longest run by a musical with its 1,405th performance.
26 Aug.: George Orwell's Animal Farm is published and becomes a Book-of-the-Month Club selection.
31 Aug.: The New Yorker devotes an entire issue to John Hersey's account of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb.
9 Oct.: The Iceman Cometh, Eugene O'Neill's first production in twelve years, opens in New York.
11 Dec.: Hank Williams cuts his first single, "Calling You," b/w "Never Again (Will I Knock on Your Door)" for the New York-based independent label, Sterling.
13 Dec.: Walt Disney's Song of the South is called "an insult to the Negro" by the National Negro Congress.

1947

Movies: The Bachelor and the Bobbysoxer, starring Cary Grant and Myrna Loy; A Double Life, starring Ronald Colman; The Farmer's Daughter, starring Loretta Young; Forever Amber, directed by Otto Preminger, starring Linda Darnell; Gentleman's Agreement, directed by Elia Kazan, starring Gregory Peck; The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, starring Gene Tierney and Rex Harrison; Great Expectations, directed by David Lean; Life With Father, directed by Michael Curtiz; Miracle on 34th Street, starring Edmund Gwenn and Natalie Wood; Monsieur Verdoux, directed by and starring Charlie Chaplin; The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, starring Danny Kaye.
Fiction: Saul Bellow, The Victim; John Home Burns, The Gallery; Erskine Caldwell, The Sure Hand of God; Theodore Dreiser, The Stoic (published posthumously); John Gunther, Inside U.S.A; Chester Himes, Lonely Crusade; Laura Hobson, Gentleman's Agreement, James Michener, Tales of the South Pacific; Kenneth Roberts, Lydia Bailey; Jean Stafford, The Mountain Lion; John Steinbeck, The Pearl and The Wayward Bus; Lionel Trilling, The Middle of the Journey.
Popular Songs: "Anniversary Song," Tex Beneke and the Glenn Miller Orchestra; "As Sweet As You," Art Lund; "Christmas Dreaming," Frank Sinatra; "The Dum Dot Song," Frank Sinatra; "Footprints in the Snow," Bill Monroe; "Free," Billy Eckstine; "Heartaches," Ted Weems and his Orchestra; "Here Comes Santa Claus," Gene Autry, "I Want to Cry," Dinah Washington; "I've Only Myself to Blame," Doris Day; "Mam'selle," Art Lund; "Move It On Over," Hank Williams; "Near You," The Andrews Sisters; "Open the Door, Richard," Count Basie and his Orchestra; "Peg O' My Heart," The Harmonicats; "Pianissimo," Perry Como; "Snatch It and Grab It," Julia Lee and Her Boyfriends; "Wedding Bells," Hank Williams.
24 Jan.: Sixty British masterpieces on loan from George VI go on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
29 Jan.: Arthur Miller's play All My Sons opens in New York.
24 Apr.: Willa Cather dies at age seventy.
7 May: At Columbia University, Virgil Thomson debuts his opera based on the life of Susan B. Anthony, The Mother of Us All.
22 May: Poet Archibald MacLeish is inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
31 May: The Art of This Century Gallery closes.
5 June: Aaron Copland's Third Symphony is voted best orchestral work of the year by the New York Music Critics.
29 Sept.: Annie Get Your Gun is banned in Memphis because of its integrated cast.
13 Oct.: The Hollywood Ten begin appearing before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC).
22 Oct.: Forever Amber opens in New York. Francis Cardinal Spellman and the Catholic Legion of Decency condemn it, but it brings in a record first-day gross of more than twenty-five thousand dollars.
3 Dec.: The Screen Directors' Guild bars Communists from holding office.
3 Dec.: Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire opens on Broadway.

1948

Movies: The Babe Ruth Story, starring William Bendix; A Foreign Affair, directed by Billy Wilder, starring Marlene Dietrich; Joan of Arc, starring Ingrid Bergman; Johnny Belinda, starring Jane Wyman and Lew Ayres; Hamlet, starring Laurence Olivier; Key Largo, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacali; Red River, starring John Wayne; The Red Shoes, directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger; The Snake Pit, starring Olivia de Havilland; The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, directed by John Huston, starring Humphrey Bogart.
Fiction: Pearl Buck, Peony; Erskine Caldwell, This Very Earth; Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms; Willa Cather, The Old Beauty and Others (published posthumously); James Gould Cozzens, Guard of Honor; John Dos Passos, The Grand Design; William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust; Martha Gelhorn, Wine of Astonishment; Zora Neale Hurston, Seraph on the Suwanee; Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead; Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus; Carl Sandburg, Remembrance Rock; Irwin Shaw, The Young Lions; Upton Sinclair, One Clear Call; Elizabeth Spencer, Fire in the Morning; Gore Vidal, City and the Pillar; Thornton Wilder, The Ides of March.
Popular Songs: "Ah, But It Happens," Frankie Laine; "Am I Asking Too Much?," Dinah Washington; "Black Coffee," Sarah Vaughan; "Blue Christmas," Ernest Tubb; "Bouquet of Roses," Eddy Arnold; "Buttons and Bows," Dinah Shore; "Confess," Patti Page; "The Deck of Cards," Tex Ritter; "Faraway Places," Bing Crosby and the Ken Darby Choir, "Gloria," The Mills Brothers; "Honky Tonkin'," Hank Williams; "The Huckle Buck," Frank Sinatra; "Mañana," Peggy Lee; "Mansion on the Hill," Hank Williams; "Oklahoma Waltz," Patti Page; "The Pretty Mama Blues," Ivory Joe Hunter.
7 Jan.: Ring Lardner, Jr., sues 20th Century-Fox for $1.4 million and Edward Dmytryk sues RKO Radio for $1.8 million because they were dismissed after their convictions for contempt of Congress.
11 Mar.: Zelda Fitzgerald, widow of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and eight others die in a hospital fire in Asheville, North Carolina.
27 Mar.: Following nearly a year's imprisonment on a narcotics charge, blues singer Billie Holiday performs at New York's Carnegie Hall.
28 Apr.: Igor Stravinsky conducts the first performance of his ballet Orpheus in New York.
29 May: Oklahoma! closes on Broadway after a record 2,246 performances and a $7-million gross.
4 Aug.: New York's Metropolitan Opera cancels the 1948-1949 season after three of twelve unions representing the employees refuse to accept contracts renewing the previous year's terms.
7 Aug.: Hank Williams joins the country-music radio program Louisiana Hayride.
23 Aug.: Unions accept renewal and the Metropolitan Opera season is reinstated.
6 Oct.: The Museum of Modern Art purchases its first work by Willem de Kooning (Painting),
25 Oct.: The Supreme Court upholds a New York obscenity ban on Edmund Wilson's Memoirs of Hecate County.
30 Oct.: RKO Studios agrees to separate its film production and distribution from its theater holdings, in compliance with a Justice Department antitrust suit.
4 Nov.: T. S. Eliot is awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.
29 Nov.: The Metropolitan Opera season opens with Verdi's Otello. It is the first time a Met production is shown on television.
30 Dec.: Kiss Me Kate, with songs by Cole Porter, opens in New York.

1949

Movies: Adam's Rib, starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn; All the Kings Men, starring Broderick Crawford; Battleground, starring Van Johnson; The Champion, starring Kirk Douglas; The Heiress, starring Olivia De Havilland and Montgomery Clift; In the Good Old Summertime, starring Judy Garland and Van Johnson; Letter to Three Wives, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz; Madame Bovary, starring James Mason and Jennifer Jones; Portrait of Jenny, directed by William Dieterle, starring Joseph Cotten and Jennifer Jones; Samson and Delilah, directed by Cecil B. DeMille; Sands of Iwo Jima, starring John Wayne; She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, directed by John Huston, starring John Wayne; White Heat, starring James Cagney.
Fiction: Nelson Algren, The Man With the Golden Arm; Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky; Pearl Buck, Kinfolk; Truman Capote, A Tree of Night and Other Stories; William Faulkner, Knight's Gambit; John Hawkes, The Cannibal; Shirley Jackson, The Lottery; Sinclair Lewis, The God-Seeker; Robert Lowry, The Wolf That Fed Us; John P. Marquand, The Point of No Return; John O'Hara, A Rage to Live; Harold Robbins, The Dream Merchants; Upton Sinclair, Oh Shepherd, Speak!; Eudora Welty, The Golden Apples.
Popular Songs: "Baby, It's Cold Outside," Dinah Shore and Buddy Clark; "Bali Ha'i," Perry Como; "The Blossoms on the Bough," The Andrews Sisters; "Bluebird on Your Windowsill," Doris Day; "Boogie Chillin'," John Lee Hooker; "Cabaret," Rosemary Clooney; "Careless Hands," Mel Torme; "A Dreamer's Holiday," Perry Como; "Happy Talk," Juanita Hall; "He Calls Me Crazy," Billie Holiday; "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," Hank Williams; "Land of Love," Nat King Cole; "A Marshmallow World," Bing Crosby; "Sittin' By the Window," Vic Damone; "Smokey Mountain Boogie," Tennessee Ernie Ford; "Some Enchanted Evening," Ezio Pinza; "Who Do You Know in Heaven?" The Ink Spots; "A Wonderful Guy," Mary Martin.
11 Jan.: In New York City John Cage premieres his Sonatas and Interludes, performed by Maro Ajemian.
22 Jan.: In San Francisco Billie Holiday is arrested for possession of opium; she will later be acquitted of the charges.
10 Feb.: Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, directed by Elia Kazan, opens on Broadway.
19 Feb.: Ezra Pound receives the Bollingen Prize for the Pisan Cantos.
25 Apr.: Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea is published by New Directions Press.
28 Apr.: Leonard Bernstein wins the Boston Symphony Orchestra Merit Award for his Age of Innocence.
5 May: Thomas Mann is given the Award of Merit Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
23 May: The Hollywood Ten, dismissed for refusing to tell the House Un-American Activities Committee whether or not they were Communists, file suit against Hollywood producers.
4 June: Hank Williams's "Lovesick Blues" hits number one on the hillbilly chart of Btllboard magazine.
11 June: Hank Williams joins the country-music radio program Grand Ole Opry.
9 Aug.: Life magazine asks the question, "Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?"
19 Aug.: The Library of Congress discontinues all prizes for art, music, and literature on the recommendation of Congress following Ezra Pound's winning of Bollingen Prize.
16 Nov.: U.S. academics recommend twenty American literary works for a UNESCO publication of the world's great classics.