1821 in literature

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The year 1821 in literature involved some significant events.

Events

• In the first known obscenity case in the United States, a Massachusetts court outlawed the John Cleland novel, Fanny Hill . The publisher, Peter Holmes, was convicted for printing a "lewd and obscene" novel.
• August 4 - Atkinson & Alexander publish the Saturday Evening Post for the first time as a weekly newspaper.

New books

• James Fenimore Cooper - The Spy
• Thomas De Quincey - Confessions of an English Opium Eater
• Pierce Egan - Real Life in London
• John Galt
  • Annals of the Parish
  • The Ayrshire Legatees
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years (German: Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre)
• I. M. H. Hales - Talisman, a Tale of Mystery
• Ann Hatton - Lovers and Friends
• C. D. Haynes - The Spectre of St. Michael's
• Hannah Maria Jones – Gretna Green
• Thomas H. Marshall - The Irish Necromancer
• Charles Nodier - Smarra
• Thomas Love Peacock - Maid Marian
• Anna Maria Porter - The Village of Mariendorpt
• Jane Porter - The Scottish Chiefs
• Sir Walter Scott - Kenilworth

New drama

• Alexandre-Vincent Pineux Duval - Le Faux Bonhomme
• Franz Grillparzer - Das Goldene Vliess

Poetry

• Heinrich Heine - Poems
• Alessandro Manzoni - Il Cinque Maggio
• Percy Bysshe Shelly - Adonais

Non-fiction

• George Grote - Statement of the Question of Parliamentary Reform
• William Hazlitt - Table Talk
• James Mill - Elements of Political Economy
• John Roberton - Kalogynomia, or the Laws of Female Beauty
• Robert Southey - Life of Cromwell

Births

• March 19 - Richard Francis Burton (+ 1890)
• April 9 - Charles Baudelaire (+ 1867)
• October 30 - Fyodor Dostoevsky (+ 1881)
• November 28 - Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov (+ 1877)
• December 6 - Dora Greenwell (+ 1882)
• December 12 - Gustave Flaubert (+ 1880)

Deaths

• January 14 - Jens Zetlitz, Norwegian poet
• February 23 - John Keats, poet
• February 26 - Joseph de Maistre, philosopher
• March 17 - Louis-Marcelin de Fontanes, poet
• May 2 - Hester Thrale, diarist and friend of Dr Johnson
• August 1 - Elizabeth Inchbald, writer

Awards