May 4 in Fiction

Movie Star Wars (1977)

5/4  · George Lucas

May the Fourth is not an event within the Star Wars universe — no battle is fought, no planet destroyed on this date in the galaxy far, far away. It is a fan holiday built on a pun: 'May the Fourth be with you,' a play on the franchise's defining phrase that first appeared in a 1979 British newspaper congratulating Margaret Thatcher. What began as a joke became tradition, then institution: Disney officially embraced the date in 2013, California declared it Star Wars Day in 2019, and the entire fandom pauses every May 4th to celebrate a story that has, for many, become mythology.

Literature Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1869)

5/4  · Lewis Carroll

On May 4th — the real Alice Liddell's birthday, encoded into Carroll's text as a private joke — a bored girl dozing on a riverbank follows a white rabbit down a hole and falls into Wonderland: a nonsensical underground realm of talking animals, an existentially unhelpful Caterpillar, and a queen who settles all disputes with 'Off with their heads!'