1713 Anglo-Irish novelist Laurence Sterne, author of the early, sprawling experimental novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, was born in Clonmel, County Tipperary, Ireland.

1819 Victorian novelist Mary Ann Evans, better known by her pen name George Eliot, was born in Warwickshire, England. Her works included Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, and Silas Marner.

1820 The whaleship Essex sunk after it was attacked by a sperm whale. Thirty years later Herman Melville, only a year old at the time of the incident, used the event as the basis for his most famous work, Moby-Dick.

1849 Frances Hodgson Burnett, American playwright and author of several excellent children's books including Little Lord Fauntleroy, A Little Princess, and The Secret Garden, was born in Manchester, England.

1858 Selma Lagerlof, both the first woman and the first Swedish writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, was born in Marbacka, Sweden. Among her novels were Gosta Berlings saga and Jerusalem.

1869 French author and Nobel laureate Andre Gide, whose works included The Immoralist , If It Die, and The Counterfeiters, was born in Paris.

1870 American novelist Mary Johnston, author of To Have and to Hold, was born in Buchanan, VA.

1874 Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd was published.

1882 English artist and writer Wyndham Lewis, author of the satirical epic The Apes of God, was born on a yacht off Nova Scotia, Canada.

1895 English author Louis Golding was born in Manchester. Although he wrote on a wide variety of subjects, today he is best remembered for his novels including Forward from Babylon, Magnolia Street, and Mr. Emmanuel.

1907 Western novelist Jack Schaefer, whose works included Monte Walsh and the classic Shane, was born in Cleveland, OH.

1916 Jack London, author of such classics as Call of the Wild and White Fang, died in Glen Ellen, CA, at age 40, either from uremic poisoning, or from an overdose (accidental or deliberate) of the morphine he was taking to alleviate the pain.

1917 Australian novelist Jon Cleary, whose works include Sundowners, The High Commissioner, and Peter's Pence, was born in Sydney.

1922 Political activist and IRA member Erskine Childers was executed by firing squad during the Anglo-Irish War. He was 52. His son went on the become the President of the Republic of Ireland, and his grandson held several important United Nations positions. As an author Childers is remembered for his espionage novel The Riddle of the Sands.

1922 After years of severe asthma and general poor health, French novelist Marcel Proust, author of the monumental seven-part novel known in English as Remembrance of Things Past, died in Paris at age 51.

1923 South African novelist and Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, author of The Conservationist and July's People, was born in Springs, Transvaal.

1925 Author, columnist, ex-CIA operative, founder of the National Review, and spokesman for all things Right William F. Buckley was born in New York City. The scion of oil barons, Buckley's most lasting contribution to American letters may be his son, the satirical novelist Christopher Buckley.

1936 Novelist Don DeLillo, author of such works as Americana, White Noise, and Mao II, was born in New York City.

1939 Canadian poet and novelist Margaret Atwood, author of Cat's Eye, The Robber Bride, and The Handmaid's Tale, was born in Ottawa, Ontario.

1945 Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Ellen Glasgow, author of In This Our Life, died in Richmond, VA at age 72.

1948 British author A.E.W. Mason, best known for his classic adventure novel The Four Feathers, died in London at age 83.

1961 Arundhati Roy, who won the Booker Prize for her first novel The God of Small Things, was born in Assam, India.

1963 English novelist Aldous Huxley, author of Antic Hay, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, and most notably Brave New World among many others, died in Los Angeles at age 69.

1963 British author C.S. Lewis died in Oxford a week before his 65th birthday. He is known to a wide variety of readers for his witty Christian apologetics (such as The Screwtape Letters), his science-fiction allegories (beginning with Out of the Silent Planet), and his enduring children's fantasy series The Chronicles of Narnia.

1963 President and occasional author John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, TX. Prior to his presidency he wrote Why England Slept, As We Remember Joe, and Profiles in Courage.

1968 English novelist and illustrator Mervyn Peake, best known for his gothic Gormenghast trilogy, died in Burcot, Oxfordshire at age 57. He had suffered from Parkinson's Disease from his mid-40s onwards.

1976 Andre Malraux, author of La Condition Humaine [Man's Fate], died at age 75 in Creteil, France.

1990 Welsh novelist Roald Dahl, best known for such children's classics as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach, died of leukemia in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, at the age of 74.

1993 English novelist and critic Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange and Enderby Outside, died of lung cancer in London at age 76.