1863 in literature

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The year 1863 in literature involved some significant new books.

Events

• First reunions of the Romanian Junimea literary society, a group which was to exercise a major influence on Romanian culture until the 1910s.

New books

• Mary Elizabeth Braddon
  • Aurora Floyd
  • Eleanor's Victory
• George Eliot - Romola
• Elizabeth Gaskell - Sylvia's Lovers
• Théophile Gautier - Capitan Fracassa
• Edward Everett Hale - The Man Without a Country
• Mary Jane Holmes - Marian Grey
• Julia Kavanagh - Queen Mab
• Charles Kingsley - The Water-Babies
• Sheridan Le Fanu - The House by the Churchyard
• Leo Tolstoy - The Cossacks
• John Townsend Trowbridge - Cudjo's Cave
• Giovanni Verga - Sulle Lagune (In the Lagoons)
• Jules Verne - Five Weeks in a Balloon

New drama

• W. S. Gilbert - Uncle Baby

Poetry

• Lizzie Doten - Poems from the Inner Life (alleged to have been dictated by the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe)
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - Tales of a Wayside Inn, including "Paul Revere's Ride"

Non-fiction

• William Barnes - Glossary of Dorset Dialect
• William Wells Brown - The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius and His Achievements
• Francis James Child - Observations on the Language of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
• Charles Lyell - Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man
• Ernest Renan - The Life of Jesus

Births

• February 9 - Anthony Hope, adventure novelist (died 1933)
• March 3 - Arthur Machen, novelist and short story writer (died 1947)
• March 12 - Gabriele D'Annunzio, poet (died 1938)
• April 9 - Henry De Vere Stacpoole, novelist (died 1951)
• April 29
  • Constantine Cavafy, Greek Alexandrine poet (died 1933)
  • William Randolph Hearst, newspaper proprietor (died 1951)
• August 7 - Gene Stratton Porter, American novelist and naturalist (died 1924)
• September 8 - W. W. Jacobs, short story writer (died 1943)
• September 22 - Ferenc Herczeg, dramatist (died 1954)
• November 1 - Arthur Morrison, writer (died 1945)
• November 21 - Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, novelist (died 1944)
• December 16 - George Santayana, novelist and poet (died 1952)

Deaths

• May 13 - August Hahn, theologian
• July 3 - William Barksdale, Confederate journalist and general
• July 10 - Clement Clarke Moore, poet
• September 17 - Alfred de Vigny, poet
• September 20 - Jacob Grimm, fairy-tale author
• October 6 - Frances Trollope, novelist
• October 8 - Richard Whately, theologian
• December 17 - Émile Saisset, philosopher
• December 24 - William Makepeace Thackeray, novelist

Awards