A novel organic nonlinear optical material 1-(4-methylphenyl)-3-(4-methoxyphenyl)-2-propen-1-one has been synthesized by the standard method. The synthesized compound was purified by repeated re-crystallization. FT-IR spectra was recorded to identify the various functional groups present in the compound. Good quality crystals were grown by slow evaporation technique using acetone/DMF as solvents. The grown crystals are having the dimension of 25 x 15 x 2 mm(3) and these were characterized by UV-visible and powder X-ray diffraction. From the XRD study, it is found that, the crystals are in the monoclinic system with a space group P21/a. Refractive index of the crystal was measured using Brewster's angle method. The second harmonic generation (SHG) efficiency of the crystal was obtained using ND-YAG laser (lambda = 1064nm), which is found to be 0.5 times that of Urea. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.