February 27: John Steinbeck, descendent of German farmers from Heiligenhaus is born on this day in 1902 in Salinas, California where the familiy had settled after his grandfather Johann Adolf Großsteinbeck immigrated to the United States and shortened the family name to Steinbeck.

February 28: Novelist, playwright, journalist Ben Hecht, whose reporting in Berlin after World War I inspired his first novel Erik Dorn is born on this day in NYC in 1894.

March 1: After an absence of eight years, writer E.M. Forster, then 41, departs for his second trip to India on this day in 1921 and uses his observations for his fifth novel A Passage to India.

March 2: H.G. Wells responds to criticism that his poetry lacks meter by declaring on this day in 1883: “Meters are used for gas, not the outpourings of the human heart.”

March 3: The Beautiful and the Damned, F. Scott’s portrait of Anthony Patch, an heir to a fortune waiting for his grandfather to die, is published on this day in 1922.

March 4: George Sand, born Aurore Dupin, and the author of the influential Indiana, meets the younger Frederic Chopin, who had become her lover, for the last time on this day in 1848.

March 5: Novelist Frank Norris, who has an alleyway in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighbourhood named after him, is born in Chicago on this day in 1870.

March 6: Gabriel Garcia Marquez author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, is born on this day in 1928 in Aracataca, Colombia.