Elias Canetti, Maria Gripe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vladimir Vysotsky, and Frank O'Hara are the acclaimed authors who were born or died on a day like this.

Elias Canetti
Elias Canetti, born on a day like this in 1905, was a Bulgarian- born modernist novelist, playwright, memoirist, and non-fiction writer. He wrote his works in German. Despite being a German language writer, Canetti settled and stayed in Britain until the 1970s, receiving British citizenship in 1952. For his last 20 years, Canetti mostly lived in Zürich. In 1981, Canetti won the Nobel Prize in Literature "for writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power". He is known chiefly for his celebrated tetralogy of autobiographical memoirs of his childhood and of pre-Anschluss Vienna (Die Gerettete Zunge; Die Fackel im Ohr; Das Augenspiel; and Das Geheimherz der Uhr: Aufzeichnungen), for his modernist novel Auto-da-Fé (Die Blendung), and for "Crowds and Power", a study of crowd behaviour as it manifests itself in human activities ranging from mob violence to religious congregations. He died in Zurich in 1994, aged 89.

Maria Gripe
Maria Gripe, born Maja Stina Walter on a day like this in 1923, was a Swedish author of books for children and young people, often written in a magical and mystical tone. In 1946 she married the artist Harald Gripe, who created cover illustrations for most of her books. His illustration career, in fact, began in connection with his wife's debut as author of "In our little town". Maria Gripe's first major success was "Josephine"(1961), the first of a series of novels that later included "Hugo" and "Josephine and Hugo". Much of her writing, particularly the later works, is suffused with a supernatural or mystical element. This change in her writing style from her less mature work was partly a result of the influence of Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, and Carl Jonas Love Almquist, and partly a reaction to violence in entertainment that had begun to gain ground in cultural expression; Gripe sought to manufacture plot tension in less overt ways. A prominent feature of Maria Gripe's writing is a respect for individuals and their unique characteristics, a trait which is especially perceptible in the social realism of the "Elvis" series, which she co-wrote with her husband Harald in the 1970s. Gripe passed away on April 5, 2007.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan", as well as for his major prose work "Biographia Literaria". His critical work, especially on Shakespeare, was highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture. He coined many familiar words and phrases, including the celebrated "suspension of disbelief". He was a major influence, via Emerson, on American transcendentalism. Despite not enjoying the name recognition or popular acclaim that Wordsworth or Shelley have had, Coleridge is one of the most important figures in English poetry. His poems directly and deeply influenced all the major poets of the age. He was known by his contemporaries as a meticulous craftsman who was more rigorous in his careful reworking of his poems than any other poet, and Southey and Wordsworth were dependent on his professional advice. His influence on Wordsworth is particularly important because many critics have credited Coleridge with the very idea of "Conversational Poetry". "Frost at Midnight"(1798), "Fears in Solitude"(1798), and "Dejection: An Ode"(1802) are some of his conversation poems. Coleridge passed away on a day like this in 1834, aged 61.

Vladimir Vysotsky
Vladimir Semyonovich Vysotsky was a Soviet singer, songwriter, poet, and actor whose career had an immense and enduring effect on Russian culture. He was born in Moscow in 1938. He became widely known for his unique singing style and for his lyrics, which featured social and political commentary in often humorous street jargon. He was also a prominent stage and screen actor. Though his work was largely ignored by the official Soviet cultural establishment, he achieved remarkable fame during his lifetime, and to this day exerts significant influence on many of Russia's popular musicians and actors who wish to emulate his iconic status. "Novel about Girls", and "Vacation in Vienna" are two of his books. He passed away on a day like this in 1980.

Frank O'Hara
Francis Russell "Frank" O'Hara was an American writer, poet and art critic. He was a member of the New York School of poetry. While O'Hara's poetry is generally autobiographical, it tends to be based on his observations of New York life rather than exploring his past. In his introduction to "The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara" edited by Donald Allen in 1971 (the first of several posthumous collections, which shared the 1972 National Book Award for Poetry) Donald Allen says that “Frank O’Hara tended to think of his poems as a record of his life is apparent in much of his work". His poetry shows the influence of Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism, Russian poetry, and poets associated with French Symbolism. Ashbery says, “The poetry that meant the most to him when he began writing was either French – Rimbaud, Mallarmé, the Surrealists: poets who speak the language of every day into the reader’s dream – or Russian – Pasternak and especially Mayakovsky, for whom he picked up what James Schuyler has called the ‘intimate yell’. O'hara passed away on a day like this in 1966.

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