March 28: Canadian humourist Stephen Leacock dies in Toronto on this day in 1944 at aged 74. The Boy I Left Behind, his autobiography, is left unfinished. Leacock’s home in Orillia, Ontario at 50 Museum Drive is now a national historic site.

March 29: On this day in 1952, E.B. White, already one of America’s best known essayists, writes to his editor describing Charlotte’s Web: “Whether children will find anything amusing in it, only time will tell.”

March 30: English writer Anna Sewell, who wrote Black Beauty: the Autobiography of a Horse, is born in Norwich in 1820.

March 31: Tennessee Williams’ play The Glass Menagerie opens on this day in 1945 at the Playhouse Theatre in New York.

April 1: “I could not seriously sit down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life” writes Jane Austen to a reader (the Prince Regent) who suggests that she make her next work a “historical romance.”

April 2: Hans Christian Andersen, son of a cobbler, is born in Odense, Denmark. His writings, including The Little Mermaid and The Ugly Duckling, will eventually be translated into 150 languages.