May 31

In literary history

• 1669Samuel Pepys wrote the last entry in his diary, fearing that candlelight was blinding him. He lived another thirty-four years but never wrote another word of it; he had kept the richest private record in the English language and then simply stopped.

Writers born on May 31

• Walt Whitman (1819)

The Daily Canon for May 31

Song of Myself by Walt Whitman (1855).