Popular films
included:
Fantasia by Walt Disney
The Grapes
of Wrath
by John Ford
The Great Dictator by Charlie
Chaplin
My Little Chickadee starring W.C.
Fields and Mae West
The Philadelphia
Story
starring Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant
and Jimmy Stewart
Rebecca starring Lawrence
Olivier and
directed by Alfred Hitchcock
The Thief of
Baghdad
starring
Sabu and Conrad Veidt.
Fiction included: Willa Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl,
Walter von Tilburg Clark’s The Ox-Bow Incident, William
Faulkner’s the Hamlet, Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell
Tolls, Carson McCullers’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter,
William Carlos Williams’s In The Money, Thomas Wolfe’s You
Can’t Go Home Again, and
Richard Wright’s Native Son.
Popular songs included: “Along the Santa Fe Trail” by Glenn
Miller and his Orchestra with Ray Eberly, “Boog-It” by Cab Calloway and
his Orchestra, “Can’t Get Indiana Off My Mind” by Kate Smith, “Devil
May Care” by Bing
Crosby, “I Can’t Love You Any More” by Benny Goodman and his Orchestra,
“Java Jive” by the Ink Spots, “Just to Ease My Worried Mind” by Roy
Acuff,
“Love Lies” by Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra with Frank Sinatra, “San
Antonio
Rose” by Bing Crosby, “Strange Fruit” by Billie Holiday, “We Three” by
The
Ink Spots, and “Well All Right!” by The Andrews Sisters.
Frank Lloyd Wright completed the People’s Church in Kansas City, which
brought modernism to church architecture.
Colorfast textiles were improved in order to be more durable after many
washings.
California opened Los Angeles's first highway, the Arroyo Seco Parkway.
April 9: The governor of New York
State signed a bill permitting children to be absent from school for
religious
observances.
May 14: The Museum of Modern Art
showed a Mexican art exhibit.
June 24: The Republican political
convention in Philadelphia was the first to be televised.
October 13: Benny Goodman signed a
contract to play with the New York Philharmonic.
November 13: Fantasia opened
in New York with Leopold Stokowski conducting the orchestra.