1478 English lawyer, statesman, and author of Utopia (a term he coined), Sir Thomas More, was born in London. He was the dedicatee of his friend Erasmus' The Praise of Folly and the subject of Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons.

1564 Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe, author of Doctor Faustus and The Jew of Malta, was born in Canterbury, England.

1812 Charles Dickens, generally considered the greatest Victorian novelist, whose works included A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations, was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire.

1819 English artist, critic, and writer John Ruskin, author of The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice, was born in London.

1828 French writer Jules Verne was born in Nantes. He studied law, had mild success as a playwright and then as a stockbroker, but today he is best remembered as one of the founding fathers of science-fiction with such seminal works as A Journey to the Center of the Earth, From the Earth to the Moon, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and the entertaining Around the World in Eighty Days.

1828 English Victorian novelist George Meredith, author of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) and The Egoist, was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire.

1863 British mystery writer J.S. Fletcher, author of The Adventures of Archer Dawe (sleuth-hound), The Charing Cross Mystery, and The Middle Temple Murder, was born in Halifax, Yorkshire. Initially popular only in England, he achieved success in America after he was praised by President Woodrow Wilson.

1866 Humorist George Ade, remembered for his Fables in Slang, was born in Kentland, IN.

1874 American poet and critic Amy Lowell, whose What's O'Clock won her a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, was born in Brookline, MA.

1885 Novelist Sinclair Lewis, whose works included Main Street, Elmer Gantry, and Dodsworth, was born in Sauk Center, MN. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Arrowsmith, but declined the prize because he felt his views of American life did not conform to those of the Pulitzer panel. A few years later he became the first American recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, an honor he accepted graciously.

1890 Russian poet, novelist, and Nobel laureate Boris Pasternak was born in Moscow. His best known work, Doctor Zhivago, was widely hailed in the West, but it aroused so much opposition in the Soviet Union that he declined the Nobel Prize.

1906 Paul Laurence Dunbar, considered by many the first great African-American poet, died of tuberculosis in Dayton, OH at age 33.

1906 Henry Roth, known for his account of the immigrant experience in Call It Sleep, was born in what is now Tismenitsya, in the Ukraine.

1911 The poet Elizabeth Bishop, whose verse appeared in The New Yorker and other magazines, was born in Worcester, MA.

1931 Sanctuary, by William Faulkner, was published. Unlike his preceding novels, which were more labors of love, he wrote Sanctuary, with its lurid themes and violent content (including an infamous rape by corncob), specifically to make money. It worked - for the first time Faulkner became known to the general public.

1932 Prolific novelist and playwright Edgar Wallace died in Hollywood while writing the story for King Kong.

1940 South African novelist and Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee, whose works include In the Heart of the Country and Life and Times of Michael K, was born in Cape Town.

1940 Scottish historian, stateman, and thriller-writer John Buchan, best known for his Richard Hannay mystery The Thirty-Nine Steps, made into a classic Alfred Hitchcock film, died in Montreal, Quebec at age 64.

1944 African-American poet and novelist Alice Walker, who won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Color Purple, was born in Eatonton, GA.

1949 Arthur Miller's best known play, Death of a Salesman, opened in New York City. Miller died 56 years later to the day.

1952 Norman Douglas, author of South Wind, died in Capri. He intentionally overdosed at age 83 after a long illness.

1963 American poet Sylvia Plath, wife of fellow-poet Ted Hughes and author of The Colossus and Ariel, committed suicide in London (in an apartment once inhabited by William Butler Yeats) two weeks after the pseudonymous publication of her novel The Bell Jar.

1978 Swedish novelist and poet Harry Martinson, the first self-taught, working class writer to be elected to the Swedish Academy, died in Stockholm at age 73. With Eyvind Johnson, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1974. He played a small role in the film version of his novel Vagen till Klockrike [The Road to Klockrike].

1986 Science-fiction writer Frank Herbert, author of the popular Dune series, died of pancreatic cancer in Madison, WI at age 65.

1989 American historian Barbara Tuchman, who won Pulitzer Prizes for both The Guns of August and Stilwell and the American Experience in China, died after a stroke in Greenwhich, CT a few days after her 77th birthday.

1992 Journalist and author Alex Haley died in Seattle, WA following a heart attack at age 70. Haley had conducted many of the most notable interviews for Playboy Magazine, and from this experience came his important biography The Autobiography of Malcolm X. His 1976 novel Roots, a fictionalized geneology tracing his own ancestry through American slavery back to Africa, was a milestone of the 1970s, as was the acclaimed television adaptation. Haley won a special Pulitzer Prize the following year, though in 1978 he settled plagiarism charges out of court.

1995 American poet and novelist James Merrill, who gained widespread appreciation in the middle of his career with his epic poems Divine Comedies, Mirabell, and Scripts for the Pageant, died in Tucson, AZ at age 68 of a heart attack, a complication of AIDS.

1998 Icelandic novelist and Nobel laureate Halldor Laxness, author of The Great Weaver from Kashmir, The Fish Can Sing, and Paradise Reclaimed, died near Reykjavik at age 95. He has a small but appreciative English audience, and many felt his 1955 Nobel Prize would have come earlier had he not previously won the Stalin Prize from the Soviet Union.

1998 Mystery author Lawrence Sanders, who published his first novel, The Anderson Tapes at age 50, died in Pompano Beach, FL at age 77.

1999 Iris Murdoch, author of such novels as Under the Net and her Booker Prize-winning The Sea, the Sea, died in Oxford of Alzheimer's disease at age 79.

2000 Peanuts creator Charles M. Shulz died.

2001 Aviation pioneer and author of such books as Listen! The Wind and A Gift from the Sea Anne Morrow Lindbergh died in Passumpsic, VT of pneumonia at age 94.

2002 Jack Henry Abbott, author of In the Belly of the Beast, hanged himself in his prison cell on February 10, 2002.

2005 American playwright Arthur Miller, whose modern classics included Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, died in Roxbury, CT of heart failure at age 89.

2006 British mystery writer Michael Gilbert, author of Game Without Rules and Office Party, died in Luddesdown, Kent at age 93.