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.

1809 Physician and author Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., remembered for such works as the poem "Old Ironsides" and The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, was born in Cambridge, MA.

1836 Bret Harte, who became famous for his accounts of mining life in such tales as "The Luck of Roaring Camp" and "The Outcasts of Poker Flat," was born in Albany, NY.

1862 Belgian symbolist poet, dramatist, and Nobel laureate Maurice Maeterlinck, author of Hot House Blooms, Pelleas and Melisande, and The Blue Bird, was born in Ghent.

1871 Theodore Dreiser, who pioneered American naturalism in novels such as Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, and An American Tragedy, was born in Terre Haute, IN.

1875 Scottish historian, stateman, and thriller-writer John Buchan, best known for his Richard Hannay mystery The Thirty-Nine Steps (made into the classic Alfred Hitchcock film), was born in Perth, Perthshire.

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

1884 Mystery writer Earl Derr Biggers, creator of Charlie Chan, was born in Warren, OH. The first of more than 50 films adapted from his work was a 1917 version of Seven Keys to Baldpate starring George M. Cohan and Hedda Hopper.

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

1896 Liam O'Flaherty was born.

1899 C.S. Forester, creator of the popular British naval officer Horatio Hornblower, as well as non-Napoleonic novels such as The African Queen, was born in Cairo, Egypt.

1904 Christopher Isherwood, who wrote of the decline of the Wiemar Republic and the rise of Nazism in Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin, was born in Cheshire, England. His works were the basis for the musical and subsequent film Cabaret.

1922 Poet and novelist John Williams, whose historical fiction Augustus won the National Book Award, was born in Clarksville, TX.

1929 Ira Levin, who wrote his first novel, the thriller A Kiss Before Dying, when he was 22, was born in New York City. He also wrote the long-running play Deathtrap, but really hit his stride with a string of inventive blockbusters: Rosemary's Baby, The Stepford Wives, and The Boys from Brazil.

1957 Georgiana Ann Randolph, better known as mystery writer Craig Rice, the first mystery writer to appear on the cover of Time Magazine, died in Los Angeles at age 49.

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.

1976 Swedish novelist and Nobel laureate Eyvind Johnson, author of Return to Ithaca and The Days of His Grace, died in Stockholm at age 76.

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

1984 Author Truman Capote, whose many well-known works included Other Voices, Other Rooms, The Grass Harp, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and In Cold Blood, died in Los Angeles, Ca at age 59 of liver disease complicated by a drug overdose.

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.

1989 Irving Stone, best known for his fictionalized biographies including Lust for Life (about Vincent Van Gogh) and The Agony and the Ecstasy (about Michaelangelo), died in Los Angeles of a heart attack at age 86.

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.