Essayists

What lands on a date

• 01-16 Susan Sontag · Born in New York City to a fur trader's family. source
• 01-20 John Ruskin · Died at Brantwood, his Lake District home. source
• 01-22 Francis Bacon · Born in London, the son of a lord keeper. source
• 01-29 H. L. Mencken · Died in Baltimore, the satirical scourge of American letters. source
• 02-08 John Ruskin · Born in London to a wealthy wine merchant. source
• 02-10 Charles Lamb · Born in London; his essays appeared as the persona Elia. source
• 02-28 Michel de Montaigne · Born at the Château de Montaigne in south-west France. source
• 04-09 Francis Bacon · Died at Highgate after catching a chill in the snow. source
• 04-10 William Hazlitt · Born in Maidstone, Kent, to a Unitarian minister. source
• 04-13 Christopher Hitchens · Born in Portsmouth, England, to a naval officer. source
• 04-15 Matthew Arnold · Died in Liverpool while visiting his daughter. source
• 04-27 Ralph Waldo Emerson · Died in Concord, Massachusetts, the sage of American Transcendentalism. source
• 05-06 Henry David Thoreau · Died of tuberculosis in Concord, aged forty-four. source
• 05-07 David Hume · Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, to a modest landowning family. source
• 05-25 Ralph Waldo Emerson · Born in Boston, Massachusetts, to a minister's family. source
• 05-29 G. K. Chesterton · Born in Kensington, London, to an estate agent. source
• 05-30 Voltaire · Died in Paris, celebrated and feared as the age's satirist. source
• 06-14 G. K. Chesterton · Died at Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, after a long literary career. source
• 06-28 Jean-Jacques Rousseau · Born in Geneva, then an independent city-state. source
• 07-02 Jean-Jacques Rousseau · Died at Ermenonville near Paris after a stroke. source
• 07-11 E. B. White · Born in Mount Vernon, New York, to a piano manufacturer. source
• 07-12 Henry David Thoreau · Born in Concord, Massachusetts, where he spent most of his life. source
• 07-31 Denis Diderot · Died in Paris after editing the Encyclopédie for decades. source
• 08-25 David Hume · Died in Edinburgh after a long illness, serene and cheerful. source
• 08-29 John Locke · Born in Wrington, Somerset, to a Puritan family. source
• 09-12 H. L. Mencken · Born in Baltimore, Maryland, to a cigar manufacturer. source
• 09-13 Michel de Montaigne · Died at his château after years of kidney trouble. source
• 09-18 Samuel Johnson · Born in Lichfield, Staffordshire, to a bookseller. source
• 09-18 William Hazlitt · Died in Soho, London, after a prolific critical career. source
• 09-26 George Santayana · Died in Rome, a philosopher and essayist of wide influence. source
• 10-01 E. B. White · Died in Brooklin, Maine, after a long career at The New Yorker. source
• 10-05 Denis Diderot · Born in Langres, Champagne, to a cutler. source
• 10-28 John Locke · Died at Oates in Essex, a founding voice of empiricism. source
• 11-21 Voltaire · Born François-Marie Arouet in Paris to a notary. source
• 11-22 C. S. Lewis · Died at his home in Oxford, a week before his sixty-fifth birthday. source
• 11-29 C. S. Lewis · Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, to a solicitor. source
• 12-05 Joan Didion · Born in Sacramento, California, to a finance officer. source
• 12-13 Samuel Johnson · Died in London, having shaped the English dictionary. source
• 12-15 Christopher Hitchens · Died in Houston, Texas, of oesophageal cancer. source
• 12-16 George Santayana · Born in Madrid, Spain, and raised in Boston. source

+ 4 more day-precise entries in the corpus.

The year rail

Some lives are known by year, not by day. Those entries are kept on a rail — never placed on a fabricated date.

• Essays 1580
• Walden 1854
• On Liberty 1859
• The Souls of Black Folk 1903
• A Room of One's Own 1929