• May 1: English essayist and politician Joseph Addison (1672; d.1719); African-American poet, folklorist, and critic Sterling A. Brown (1901; d. 1989), born Washington D.C.; Swiss autobiographical fiction writer Niccolo Tucci (1908); novelist and Brooklyn native Joseph Heller (1923), famous for Catch-22; Texan Terry Southern, novelist and scriptwriter (1924; d.1995), who collaborated on screenplays for Dr. Strangelove and Easy Rider.
• May 3: Niccolo Machiavelli (1469), Italian writer and statesman, author of The Prince; Danish journalist and reformer Jacob Riis (1849), author of How The Other Half Lives; playwright and Kansan William Inge (1913), who wrote Picnic and Bus Stop.
• May 4: English biologist and essayist Thomas Henry Huxley (1825; d.1895); Irish poet, translator, and anthologist Thomas Kinsella (1928); Israeli writer Amos Oz (1939); London-born Booker Prize winning novelist Graham Swift (1949).
• May 5: German Karl Marx (1818), founder of modern Communism and co-author of Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto; intrepid American stunt journalist and social reformer Nellie Bly (1856), aka Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman, known for her quick trip around the world.
• May 6: Minneapolis native and Burma Shave jingle-writer Allan G. Odell (1903); illustrator and author of children's books Leo Lionni (1910).
• May 7: British poet Robert Browning (1812; d.1889), husband of Elizabeth Barrett Browning; Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), Indian poet and writer, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913; Chicago native, African American poet, short story writer, and essayist Fenton Johnson (1888; d.1958), remembered for his free verse depictions of urban despair Illinois-born poet, playwright, lawyer, farmer, Librarian of Congress from 1939-1944, and winner of three Pulitzer prizes Archibald MacLeish (1892).

• May 8: British historian Edward Gibbon (1737; d.1794), author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788), written entirely from first sources; children and YA author Irene Hunt (1907); Harlem-raised writer of juvenile biographies of black figures Louise Meriwether (1923); she also wrote the acclaimed semi-autobiographical Daddy Was A Numbers Runner (1970); San-Francisco-born Pulitzer-prize winning poet Gary Snyder (1930).
• May 9: Peter Pan creator Sir J[ames] M[atthew] Barrie (1860; d.1937), Scottish novelist and playwright; Washington, D.C. native, African-American novelist, short story writer, and physician Rudolph [John Chauncey] Fisher (1897; d.1934), who wrote the first black American detective novel, The Conjure-Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem (1932); William Pene-DuBois (1916), author of Newbery Award winner The Twenty-One Balloons (1947); British novelist and Watership Down author Richard Adams (1920); Iowa poet Mona Van Duyn (1921), winner of the National Book Award and the first woman Poet Laureate of the U.S.
• May 10: Arizona-born African-American jazz and performance poet Jayne Cortez (1936), whose poetry is concerned with racial injustice and political oppression
• May 11: Russian-born songwriter Irving Berlin (1888), author of "God Bless America" and "White Christmas," among many others; Nebraskan writer Mari Sandoz (1901), who wrote the six-volume Great Plains series; Canadian Incredible Journey author Sheila Burnford (1918).
• May 12: Nonsense poet Edward Lear (1812; d.1888); Pre-Raphaelite poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti nee Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti (1828; 1882); Alabama native, African American novelist and essayist Albert L. Murray (1916), who incorporated a blues aesthetic into his novels; writer of animal stories Farley Mowat (1921); Philadelphia-born novelist and poet Rosellen Brown (1939)
• May 13: British diarist and journalist Henry Crabb Robinson (1775); British novelist Daphne Du Maurier (1907), author of Rebecca (1939); children's author Norma Klein (1938); children's author, Sweet Valley High creator, Francine Pascal (1938); British travel writer and novelist (Charles) Bruce Chatwin (1940), author of In Patagonia; Boston native and short-story writer and novelist Rachel Ingalls (1940).
• May 14: Nebraskan journalist and novelist Hal (Harold Glen) Borland (1900).

EXHIBITION HALL is a monthly feature of the Luise V. Hanson Library which highlights and presents local, national, or international events or educational resources for the benefit of the Waldorf College community. c. 2005-2008

                           May 01, 2008

• May 15: Oz creator L. Frank Baum (1856; d.1919); Virginian historian, biographer, and Pulitzer Prize winner Douglas Southall Freeman (1886), who wrote the four-volume R.E. Lee (1934) as well as a seven-volume biography of George Washington; Texas-born storywriter and novelist Katherine Anne Porter (1890); Russian (Ukrainian) novelist/satirist Mikhail Bulgakov (1891).
• May 16: Massachusetts-born teacher and publisher Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (1804), who introduced the concept of childhood education to America; oral historian and Bronx-native (Louis) "Studs" Terkel (1912); Baltimore-born feminist poet Adrienne Rich (1929), author of Diving into the Wreck, among many; kids' author Bruce Coville (1950)
• May 17: British novelist and stream-of-consciousness pioneer Dorothy Miller Richardson (1873); Wisconsin-born novelist and forger Frederic Prokosch (1908), best known for The Asiatics (1935); North Carolina-born African American children's author Eloise Greenfield (1929); Swedish playwright, novelist, and poet Lars Gustafsson (1936).
• May 18: British philosopher, mathematician, pacifist, and author Bertrand Russell (1872), who won the 1950 Literature Nobel Prize, partly for A History of Western Philosophy (1945).
• May 19: Kansas-born journalist and novelist Jim Lehrer (1934), host of the PBS show "The News Hour;"; Chicago-born African-American playwright Lorraine Vivian Hansberry (1930), and screenwriter Nora Ephron (1941), sister of Delia Ephron, and writer or director of When Harry Met Sally (1989), Sleepless in Seattle (1993), and You’ve Got Mail (1998).
• May 20: French novelist Honoré de Balzac (1799; d.1850), who wrote The Human Comedy in 80 volumes.
• May 21: Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265), author of The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Parasdiso; British poet, critic, translator, and satirist Alexander Pope (1688).

May 22: Sherlock Holmes' alter ego, Scottish-born physician, novelist, and historian Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859; d.1930); NYC-born writer Peter Matthiessen (1927), whose memoir The Snow Leopard (1978) won the National Book Award
May 23: American actor, playwright and diplomat John Howard Payne (1791); English poet and humourist Thomas Hood (1799; d.1845); Massachusetts-born journalist, social reformer, critic, and foreign correspondent for the New York Tribune, Margaret Fuller (1810; d.1850 in a boat fire); Los Angeles-born Newbery Medal winner Scott O'Dell (1898).
May 24: English playwright Sir Arthur Wing Pinero (1855), a popular and prolific English dramatist during his time.
May 25: English writer and politican Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton (1803; d.1873), best known for his historical novels, such as The Last Days of Pompeii (1834); American (Boston born) transcendentalist, essayist, philosopher, and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803; d.1882), liberal in politics and philosophy, yet skeptical of doctrinaire positions; Michigan-born poet and 1954 Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry Theodore Roethke (1908; d.1963); NYC-born spy thriller novelist Robert Ludlum (1927; d.2001).
May 26: Mississippi-born New York poet Maxwell Bodenheim (1893), known as the Bard of Greenwich Village in the 1920s.
May 27: English novelist [Enoch] Arnold Bennett (1867; d.1931), who wrote over 30 novels and short story collections portraying lower middle-class life in the Midlands; French novelist and physician Louis Ferdinand Céline (1894; d.1961), aka Louis Fuch Destouches, whose hallucinatory and crude novels prefigured the literature of the absurd; NYC-born novelist Herman Wouk (1915), who won a Pulitzer for his novel The Caine Mutiny; environmentalist writer Rachel Carson (1907)
May 28: James Bond creator and Brit Ian Fleming (1908); Southern novelist (born Alabama) Walker Percy (1916; d.1990); Utah native and poet May Swenson (1919; d.1989); Connecticut-born writer of books about rich people Stephen Birmingham (1932)
May 29: Prolific British essayist, literary critic, novelist, and poet, and short-story writer, and creator of detective Father Brown, G[ilbert] K[eith] Chesterton (1874; d.1936).
May 30: Kentucky-born (NYC raised) Harlem Renaissance poet and children's writer Countee Cullen (1903; d.1946); British ghost-story writer R. Chetwynd-Hayes (1919)
May 31: Besides Elizabeth Coatsworth (1893) and Walt Whitman (1819); Mississippi-born novelist and poet Al Young (1939)