John Dryden, P. L. Travers, Hermann Hesse, Mahmoud Darwish, and Tove Jansson are the acclaimed authors who were born or died on a day like this.

John Dryden
John Dryden, born on a day like this in 1631, was an influential English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who dominated the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the period came to be known in literary circles as the Age of Dryden. Walter Scott called him "Glorious John". He was made Poet Laureate in 1668. After the Restoration, Dryden quickly established himself as the leading poet and literary critic of his day and he transferred his allegiances to the new government. Along with Astraea Redux, Dryden welcomed the new regime with two more panegyrics; "To His Sacred Majesty: A Panegyric on his Coronation" (1662), and "To My Lord Chancellor" (1662). Dryden's greatest achievements were in satiric verse: the mock-heroic "MacFlecknoe", a more personal product of his Laureate years, was a lampoon circulated in manuscript and an attack on the playwright Thomas Shadwell. This line of satire continued with "Absalom and Achitophel" (1681) and "The Medal" (1682). His other major works from this period are the religious poems "Religio Laici" (1682), written from the position of a member of the Church of England; his 1683 edition of Plutarch's "Lives" Translated From the Greek by Several Hands in which he introduced the word biography to English readers; and "The Hind and the Panther", (1687) which celebrates his conversion to Roman Catholicism. Dryden passed away on May 1, 1700, aged 68.

P. L. Travers
Pamela Lyndon Travers, born on a day like this in 1899, was an Australian-born novelist, actress and journalist. In 1924 she emigrated to England where she wrote under the pen name P. L. Travers. In 1933 she began writing her series of children's novels about the mystical and magical English nanny Mary Poppins. Travers greatly admired and emulated J. M. Barrie, the author of the novel Peter Pan, which bears many structural resemblances to Travers' own major work, the Mary Poppins series. (Indeed, Travers' first publisher was Peter Llewelyn Davies, Barrie's adopted son and widely regarded as the model for Peter Pan). Published in London in 1934, "Mary Poppins" was Travers' first literary success. Seven sequels followed (the last in 1988), as well as a collection of other novels, poetry collections and works of non-fiction. Her popular books have been adapted many times, including the 1964 film starring Julie Andrews and the Broadway musical originally produced in London's West End. Travers passed away on April 23, 1996 at age 96.

Hermann Hesse
Hermann Hesse was a German-Swiss poet, novelist, and painter. Hesse released his first small volume of poetry, "Romantic Songs" in 1896. He wrote "Posthumous Writings and Poems of Hermann Lauscher" in 1902, and with the novel "Peter Camenzind" came a breakthrough. The novel became popular throughout Germany. Throughout his writing career Hesse has won many awards including the Goethe Prize in 1946, Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 1955 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946. His best-known works include "Steppenwolf", "Siddhartha", and "The Glass Bead Game", each of which explores an individual's search for authenticity, self-knowledge and spirituality. Hesse passed away on a day like this in 1962, aged 85. 

Mahmoud Darwish 
Mahmoud Darwish was a Palestinian poet and author who won numerous awards for his literary output and was regarded as the Palestinian national poet. Darwish published over thirty volumes of poetry and eight books of prose. He was editor of Al-Jadid, Al-Fajr, Shu'un Filistiniyya and Al-Karmel (1981). On May 1, 1965 when the young Darwish read his poem “Bitaqat huwiyya” [Identity Card] to a crowd in a Nazareth movie house, there was a tumultuous reaction. Within days the poem had spread throughout the country and the Arab world. Published in his second volume "Leaves of Olives" (Haifa 1964), the six stanzas of the poem repeat the cry “Write down: I am an Arab". In his work, Palestine became a metaphor for the loss of Eden, birth and resurrection, and the anguish of dispossession and exile. Darwish's early writings are in the classical Arabic style. He wrote monorhymed poems adhering to the metrics of traditional Arabic poetry. In the 1970s he began to stray from these precepts and adopted a "free-verse" technique that did not abide strictly by classical poetic norms. The quasi-Romantic diction of his early works gave way to a more personal, flexible language, and the slogans and declarative language that characterized his early poetry were replaced by indirect and ostensibly apolitical statements, although politics was never far away. Darwish passed away on a day like this in 2008, aged 67.

Tove Jansson
Tove Marika Jansson was born on a day like this in 1914 in Finland. She was a Swedish-speaking Finnish novelist, painter, illustrator and comic strip author. Jansson is principally known as the author of the Moomin books – stories for children that involve Jansson's creations, the Moomins. They are a family of trolls who are white, round and furry in appearance, with large snouts that make them vaguely resemble hippopotamuses. The first Moomin book, "The Moomins and the Great Flood", was written in 1945. The style of the Moomin books changed as time went by. The first books, up to "Moominland Midwinter" (1957), are adventure stories that include floods, comets and supernatural events. "The Moomins and the Great Flood" deals with Moominmamma and Moomintroll's flight through a dark and scary forest, where they encounter various dangers. In "Comet in Moominland", a comet nearly destroys the Moominvalley (some critics have considered this an allegory of nuclear weapons). Finn Family Moomintroll deals with adventures brought on by the discovery of a magician's hat. "The Exploits of Moominpappa" (1950) tells the story of Moominpappa's adventurous youth and cheerfully parodies the genre of memoirs. Finally, "Moominsummer Madness" (1955) pokes fun at the world of the theatre: the Moomins explore an empty theatre and perform Moominpappa's pompous hexametric melodrama. Jansson passed away on June 27, 2001, aged 86.

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