August 12 – Green Eggs and Ham, by Dr. Seuss, is published in the United States; 40 years on it will be the fourth-best selling English-language children's hardcover book yet written.[5]
September 5 – Welsh poet Waldo Williams is imprisoned for six weeks for non-payment of income tax (a protest against defence spending).[6]
c. October – Vasily Grossman submits his novel Life and Fate (Жизнь и судьба) for publication, resulting in confiscation of the manuscript and all related material by the KGB in the Soviet Union.[7]
November – Rita Rait-Kovaleva's Russian translation of The Catcher in the Rye is published in the Soviet literary magazine Inostrannaya LiteraturaasНад пропастью во ржи ("Over the Abyss in Rye").[8]
November 8 – Richard Wright delivers a polemical lecture, "The Situation of the Black Artist and Intellectual in the United States", to students and members of the American Church in Paris, a few weeks before his death in the city from heart attack aged 52.[10]
November 10 – Lady Chatterley's Lover sells 200,000 copies in one day following its publication in the U.K. since being banned in 1928.[11]
Francophone African scholar Djibril Tamsir Niane publishes the novelization Soundjata, ou l'Epopée du Manding in Paris, the first extended transcription of the 13th-century Epic of Sundiata from Mandinka oral tradition and its first translation into a Western language.[14]
