1265 The great Italian poet Dante Alighieri, author of The Divine Comedy, was born in Florence (sometime between May 15 and June 15).

1812 Edward Lear was born.

1828 The poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti was born.

1855 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, one of the most influential volumes of poetry ever published, was deposited for copyright.

1856 L. Frank Baum, author of Wonderful Wizard of Oz and thirteen other Oz titles, was born in Chittenango, NY.

1860 Novelist and dramatist James M. Barrie was born in Kirriemuir, Angus, Scotland. After he became a successful writer he befriended the young grandsons of author George du Maurier (they were the cousins of future novelist Daphne du Maurier) and on them based his best known creation, Peter Pan. In 1924 he gave the copyright to Peter Pan to a London children's hospital, and the ownership of the character is still a matter of protracted legal disputes.

1886 The poet Emily Dickinson died at age 55 of nephritis in Amherst, MA. At the time only seven of her poems had been published.

1890 Katherine Anne Porter, author of Pale Horse, Pale Rider and Ship of Fools, was born in Indian Creek, TX. Her 1965 Collected Stories won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

1891 Russian playwright and novelist Mikhail Bulgakov, author of Heart of a Dog and The Master and Margarita, was born in Kiev, Ukraine.

1896 Henry Cuyler Bunner died in Nutley, NJ at age 40. He is known for his fiction (such as 1893's Made in France), his drama (such as 1883's Tower of Babel), and his poetry (such as Airs from Arcady and Elsewhere). But he is perhaps best remembered as the long-time editor of Puck, which he developed from a new and struggling comic weekly into, in the words of MWEL, "a powerful social and political organ."

1904 Critic and "Lifetime Reading Plan" guru Clifton Fadiman was born.

1905 Popular British author H.E. Bates, best known for his WWII fiction including How Sleep the Brave and The Jacaranda Tree, was born in Rushden, Northamptonshire.

1907 Daphne du Maurier, author of Rebecca was born.

1907 Mystery author Leslie Charteris, creator of The Saint, was born.

1907 English novelist Daphne du Maurier, best known for her novel Rebecca, was born in London. Her grandfather, the illustrator and author George du Maurier had invented the character of Svengali for his novel Trilby, and her cousins were the inspiration for J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan and the Lost Boys.

1907 French novelist J.-K. Huysmans, author of A rebours [Against the Grain] and La-bas [Down There], died of cancer in Paris at age 59. He was also one of the foremost art critics of his generation and was one of the first to appreciate the Impressionists.

1914 The poet Randall Jarrell was born.

1916 Spanish Nobel laureate Camilo Jose Cela, whose novels included The Family of Pascal Duarte and The Hive, was born in Iria Flavia.

1920 William Dean Howells, author of The Rise of Silas Lapham, died in New York City at age 83.

1925 American poet and critic Amy Lowell died of a cerebral hemorrhage at age 51 in the same house in Brookline, MA in which she was born. The following year she won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for What's O'Clock.

1925 H. Rider Haggard, inventor of adventurer Allan Quatermain, died in London at age 68.

1930 Stanley Elkin was born.

1930 Juvenile series mastermind Edward Stratemeyer, who created such series as the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and the Bobbsey Twins, died in Newark, NJ of pneumonia at age 67.

1936 American novelist Mary Johnston, author of To Have and to Hold, died at age 65.

1937 Science-fiction author Roger Zelazny was born.

1940 Bruce Chatwin was born.

1940 Winston Churchill, later to win the Nobel Prize for Literature among many accolades, became Prime Minister of Great Britain.

1940 British novelist and travel writer Bruce Chatwin, author of In Patagonia and The Songlines, was born in Sheffield, Yorkshire.

1942 William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses and Other Stories was published.

1955 James Agee, film critic and author of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, died of a heart attack at age 46 in New York City. Exactly forty years before, when the author was six, his father died in an auto accident. The experience was the genesis of his most famous novel, A Death in the Family.

1961 Walker Percy's National Book Award-winning first book, The Moviegoer, was published.

1968 Mystery author Cornell Woolrich died in New York City at the age of 64, a recluse who's funeral was unattended. Since then he has often been heralded as one of the greatest mystery writers of the 20th Century.

1970 German poet and Nobel laureate Nelly Sachs, who escaped the Nazis with the help of the Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlof, died in Stockholm at age 78. She is best know for her collection of poetry O the Chimneys and her play Eli: A Mystery Play of the Sufferings of Israel.

1987 Noted literary biographer Richard Ellmann died.

1990 Walker Percy, whose first novel The Moviegoer won the National Book Award, died in Covington, LA a few weeks before his 74th birthday.

1998 Marjory Stoneman Douglas, remembered for her fiction and non-fiction about the Florida Everglades, died at the age of 108.

1999 Shel Silverstein died.

2001 Science-fiction author and humorist Douglas Adams died.

2001 Actor (the young priest in The Exorcist) and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright (for That Championship Season) Jason Miller died.