July 6

In literary history

• 1535Thomas More was beheaded on Tower Hill for refusing to acknowledge Henry VIII as head of the English Church, dying as the king's good servant, he said, but God's first. His great imagined island, Utopia, had arrived on the page nineteen years before.
• 1962William Faulkner died in Mississippi, twelve years after delivering the Nobel speech now called the greatest in the prize's history. At the time, he stood too far from the microphone and mumbled; almost no one in the hall could make out a word.

Writers born on July 6

• Hilary Mantel (1952)

The Daily Canon for July 6

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926).