1955 Times of the Talented Mr. Ripley

• June 16 – Lady and the Tramp, the Walt Disney company's 15th animated film, premieres in Chicago, Illinois. 

• September 15 – Vladimir Nabokov's controversial novel Lolita is published in Paris by Olympia Press.

• September 23 – Alec Guinness meets the actor James Dean. Guinness supposedly has a premonition of Dean's death.

• September 24 – Dwight D. Eisenhower, President of the United States suffers a coronary thrombosis while on vacation in Denver, Colorado.

• September 30 – Actor James Dean is killed when his automobile collides with another car at a highway junction near Cholame, California. Dean is just 24 years old.

• The Brooklyn Dodgers finally win the World Series, defeating the New York Yankees 2–0 in Game 7 of the 1955 baseball playoff.

• November 1 – A time bomb explodes in the cargo hold of United Airlines Flight 629, a Douglas DC-6B airliner flying above Longmont, Colorado, killing all 39 passengers and 5 crew members on board.