May 15

In literary history

• 1886Emily Dickinson died in Amherst at fifty-five, having published ten poems in her lifetime, all without her consent. Her sister found nearly 1,800 more in her desk and spent the next decade ensuring they reached the world Dickinson had declined to enter.
• 1711Alexander Pope published An Essay on Criticism anonymously at twenty-two, and the poem that gave the world to err is human, to forgive divine made his reputation overnight. He spent the rest of his career making enemies with equal efficiency.

Writers born on May 15

• L. Frank Baum (1856),
• Mikhail Bulgakov (1891),
• Max Frisch (1911)

The Daily Canon for May 15

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain by Emily Dickinson (1861).