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

1763 On May 16th, 1763, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell first met. To commemorate this event, on the anniversary of this date in 1791 Boswell published his Life of Johnson, often considered the greatest biography written in English.

1799 Honoré Balzac was born.

1806 Philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill was born.

1831 French priest and abolitionist Henri Gregoire, among whose works was An Enquiry concerning the intellectual and moral faculties, and literature of negroes, died in Paris on May 20, 1831 at age 80.

1842 Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol's comic novel which is considered the foundation of 19th Century Russian realism, was published.

1845 The poets Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett met (for the first time that is - afterwards they met often).

1855 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, one of the most influential volumes of poetry ever published, was deposited for copyright on May 15, 1855.

1856 L. Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and thirteen other Oz titles, was born in Chittenango, New York on May 15, 1856.

1864 Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, and numerous classic short stories, died in Plymouth, New Hampshire on May 19, 1864 at age 59, possibly of stomach cancer.

1872 Welsh mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell was born in Ravenscroft, Trelleck, Monmouthshire. Though not generally considered a literary author, in 1950 Russell won the Nobel Prize for Literature, being cited for "his many-sided and significant writings, in which he appeared as the champion of humanity and freedom of thought."

1882 Dorothy Richardson, a pioneer in use of stream-of-consciousness technique whose works predated Joyce and Woolf, was born on May 17, 1882.

1882 Norwegian novelist Sigrid Undset, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, was born May 20, 1882.

1886 The poet Emily Dickinson died at age 55 of nephritis in Amherst, Massachusetts on May 15, 1886. 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, Texas on May 15, 1890. 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 on May 15, 1891.

1904 Critic and "Lifetime Reading Plan" guru Clifton Fadiman was born on May 15, 1904.

1904 Mystery writer Margery Allingham was born on May 20, 1904.

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 on May 16, 1905.

1905 American writer W.M. Spackman's first novel, Heyday, was published in 1953 and followed by his second novel 25 years later in 1978, An Armful of Warm Girl. He was born in Coatesville, Pennsylvania on May 20, 1905 and was highly praised during his career by John Updike and Stanley Elkin.

1909 English Victorian novelist George Meredith, author of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) and The Egoist, died in Box Hill, Surrey, at age 81.

1912 Studs Terkel was born on May 16, 1912.

1914 The poet Randall Jarrell was born on May 16, 1914.

1918 Mexican author Juan Rulfo, whose novel Pedro Paramo and short story collection The Burning Plain were early, key works of Latin American magical realism, was born in Sayula, Jalisco on May 16, 1917.

1921 Patrick Dennis, best known for his play Auntie Mame, was born.

1922 Booth Tarkington's novel Alice Adams was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction on May 21, 1922, making him the first two-time winner of the award (1919 and 1922). He sandwiched Edith Wharton's win with Age of Innocence (1921) as there was no Pulitzer Prize awarded in 1920.

1926 English novelist Ronald Firbank, whose works included Vainglory, Valmouth, and The Flower Beneath the Foot, died of lung disease in Rome, Italy at age 40.

1929 American poet and critic Adrienne Rich, who won the National Book Award for her collection Diving into the Wreck, was born in Baltimore, Maryland on May 16, 1929. When she was still an undergraduate at Radcliffe College, <>W.H. Auden selected her poems for the Yale Younger Poets series, resulting in her first book, A Change of World.

1930 Lorraine Hansberry, author of A Raisin in the Sun was born.

1932 Paul E. Erdman, author of The Billion Dollar Sure Thing, was born.

1935 T.E. Lawrence, known popularly as Lawrence of Arabia and author of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, died in a motorcylce accident in Dorset, England, at the age of 46.

1940 Swedish poet and Nobel laureate Verner von Heidenstam died in Ovralid, Sweden at age 80.

1944 Humorist George Ade, remembered for his Fables in Slang, died in Brook, Indiana on May 16, 1944 at age 78, a millionaire from his writings and subsequent real estate investments.

1944 German novelist W.G. Sebald, whose works included Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn, was born Wertach im Allgau on May 18, 1944.

1946 American novelist Booth Tarkington, author of the classic of boyhood adventure Penrod, as well as the Pulitzer Prize winners The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams, died in his hometown of Indianapolis on May 19, 1946 at age 76.

1950 Imagist poet John Gould Fletcher, whose 1938 Selected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize, committed suicide by drowning in his home town of Little Rock, Arkansas at the age of 64.

1952 Flannery O'Connor's's first novel, Wise Blood, was published on May 19, 1952.

1955 James Agee, film critic and author of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, died of a heart attack on May 16, 1955 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 on May 15, 1961.

1965 The Nation published Hunter S. Thompson's breakthrough article about his experiences living and riding with the Hell's Angels on May 17, 1965. It became the basis for his book Hells Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs.

1981 William Saroyan died at age 72.

1984 English poet John Betjeman died at age 77.

1985 Veteran comedy writer and composer Abe Burrows died in New York City on May 17, 1985 at age 74. Although at one time he had his own radio program, today Burrows is best remembered for his plays, including his marvelous musical adapation of Damon Runyon's Guys and Dolls and the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (both with frequent collaborator Frank Loesser). He was also a mentor to a younger generation of comedy writers, notably Larry Gelbart and his own distant cousin, Woody Allen.

1987 Swedith Nobel Laureate economist and sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, who is best known in the United States for his book An American Dilemma, a study of race relations which was influential in the 1954 landmark Supreme Court Decision Brown v. Board of Education, died in Danderyd on May 17, 1987 at age 88.

2002 Walter Lord, author of the classic account of the Titanic, A Night to Remember, died in 2002 at age 84.

2002 Popular naturalist Stephen Jay Gould died.