1797 English Romantic novelist Mary Shelley, best known for her classic Frankenstein, was born in London, the daughter social philosopher William Godwin and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. When she was 16 she met and eloped with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.

1847 George R. Sims, English playwright and creator of detecive Dorcas Dene, was born.

1850 Poet and journalist Eugene Field, author of "Little Boy Blue," "Wynken, Blynken, and Nod" and other children's verse, was born in St. Louis, MO.

1875 Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan, was born in Chicago, IL.

1883 Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, who left Russia after the hostile reaction to his novel Fathers and Sons, died in Bougival, near Paris (on August 22 by the old calendar), at the age of 64.

1888 Poet Clement Wood, known for "The Smithy of God" and "Jehovah," was born in Tuscaloosa, AL.

1892 George William Curtis, author and Prue and I, died of cancer of the stomach at age 68.

1899 Screenwriter and novelist Humphrey Cobb, best known for his novel Paths of Glory,was born to American parents in Siena, Italy.

1902 Historian and novelist Edward Eggleston, remembered for his "Hoosier" tales, died in Lake George, NY at age 64.

1905 British novelist, journalist, and critic Arthur Koestler, best known for the novel Darkness at Noon, was born in Budapest, Hungary.

1905 Mary Renault, known for her sequence of historical/mythological novels including The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea, was born in London. She spent most of her life in South Africa.

1908 African-American novelist and essayist Richard Wright, author of Uncle Tom's Children, Native Son, and Black Boy, was born near Natchez, MS.

1916 Spanish dramatist and Nobel laureate Jose Echegaray died in his home city of Madrid at age 84.

1917 Cleveland Amory, youngest ever editor of the Saturday Evening Post, co-founder of the Humane Society of the United States, and author of several books about cats (particularly one named Polar Bear whom he took in in 1977) was born in Nahant, MA.

1918 Former New York Times political reporter Allen Drury, whose first novel, Advise and Consent won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a film by Otto Preminger, was born in Houston, TX.

1922 George R. Sims, English playwright and creator of detecive Dorcas Dene, died two days after his 75th birthday.

1926 Novelist Alison Lurie, whose Foreign Affairs won the Pulitzer Prize, was born in Chicago, IL.

1957 Jack Kerouac's On the Road, the quintessential Beat novel, was published.

1962 Poet and painter e.e. cummings, whose works included The Enormous Room, Tulips and Chimneys, and Eimi, died of a cerebral hemorrhage at age 67 in North Conway, NH.

1963 The playwright and poet Louis MacNeice, author of The Dark Tower and Autumn Journal, died of pneumonia in London a few days before his 56th birthday.

1967 English poet and novelist Siegfried Sassoon, known for such antiwar works as The Old Huntsman and Counterattack, died in Heytesbury, Wiltshire a few days before his 81st birthday. He became widely known in part for his public affirmation of pacificism while he was still in the army and after having won the Military Cross. His antiwar protests were at first attributed to shell shock and he was for a time confined in a sanitorium (where he met another pacifist soldier-poet, Wilfred Owen, whose works he published after Owen's death at the front).

1970 French Nobel laureate Francois Mauriac, whose novel Vipers' Tangle is often considered his masterpiece, died in Pairs at age 84.

1971 Kiran Desai, author of Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard and the Booker Prize-winning The Inheritance of Loss, was born in New Delhi.

1973 English scholar J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, died in Bournmouth, Dorset at age 81.

1982 Frederic Dannay, who with his cousin Manfred B. Lee created the character/author Ellery Queen, died in White Plains, NY at age 76.

1983 Mystery author Zenith Jones Brown died of pneumonia in Baltimore, MD. She wrote under the pseudonyms Leslie Ford, Brenda Conrad, and as David Frome created the timid Welsh widower-sleuth Evan Pinkerton.

1985 Prolific and popular Anglo-American novelist Taylor Caldwell died in Greenwich, CT a week before her 85th birthday. The first of her many bestsellers was the 1938 novel Dynasty of Death.

1988 Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Allen Drury, died in San Francisco, CA on his 80th birthday.

1989 Prolific Belgian mystery author Georges Simenon died in Lausanne, Switzerland at age 85. He had published over 200 books under pseudonyms before he introduced his well-known Inspector Maigret in The Case of Peter the Lett, the first book published under his own name.

1997 Experimental, postmodernist novelist William S. Burroughs, whose works included Junkie, The Naked Lunch, and The Soft Machine, died in Lawrence, KS at age 83 of a collapsed heart valve.

2002 British novelist William Cooper died at age 92. He wrote four books as H.S. Hoff (his birth name) before his 1950 novel Scenes from Provincial Life (published under the Cooper pseudonym), the first of five Scenes books to follow the character Joe Lunn.

2006 Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz died in his native Cairo at age 94. Known for his portraits of contemporary Egyptians balancing tradition with the modern world, his Cairo Trilogy (Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street) is generally considered his masterpiece. Also known for his moderate politics, at the age of 82 he survived a stabbing by a militant assassin acting on a fatwa inspired by his 1959 novel Children of Our Alley.