May 5

In literary history

• 1927Virginia Woolf published To the Lighthouse, a novel of time and grief that unfolds in a single day, then leaps a decade to the bleak aftermath. The first 3,000 copies sold out within a month; she had written the whole thing in under a year.

Writers born on May 5

• Søren Kierkegaard (1813),
• Karl Marx (1818),
• Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846)

The Daily Canon for May 5

Either/Or by Søren Kierkegaard (1843).