1872 in literature

This article does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (December 2009)

The year 1872 in literature involved some significant new books.

Events

• Paul Verlaine abandons his family to go to London with Arthur Rimbaud.
• The Federation of Madrid expels all signatories of a subversive article in La Emancipación (including Paul Lafargue).
• George MacDonald goes on a lecture tour of the United States.
• Rose la Touche rejects John Ruskin for the last time.
• Lafcadio Hearn becomes a reporter on the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer.
• December 3 - George Smith presents the first translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh to a meeting of the Society of Biblical Archaeology in London.

New books

• Machado de Assis - Ressurreição
• R. D. Blackmore - The Maid of Sker
• Mary Elizabeth Braddon - To the Bitter End
• Rhoda Broughton
  • Good-bye, Sweetheart!
  • Poor Pretty Bobby
• Samuel Butler -Erewhon
• Edward George Bulwer-Lytton - The Parisians
• Wilkie Collins - Poor Miss Finch
• Mary Coolidge - What Katy Did
• Alphonse Daudet - Tartarin de Tarascon
• Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Possessed
• Alexandre Dumas, père - Création et Rédemption
• Thomas Hardy - Under the Greenwood Tree
• Mór Jókai
  • The Dark Diamonds
  • The Man with the Golden Touch
• Sheridan Le Fanu -
  • Carmilla
  • In a Glass Darkly
• Margaret Oliphant - At His Gates
• Bayard Taylor - Beauty and The Beast, and Tales of Home
• Anthony Trollope - The Golden Lion of Granpere
• Jules Verne
  • The Adventures of Three Englishmen and Three Russians in South Africa
  • The Fur Country
• Emile Zola - La Curée

New drama

• Prosper Mérimée - La Chambre bleue (published posthumously)
• August Strindberg - Master Olof
• Ivan Turgenev - A Month in the Country (first performed)

Non-fiction

• Friedrich Nietzsche - The Birth of Tragedy (Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik)
• Henry Wilson - History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, vols. 1 & 2

Births

• January 31 - Zane Grey, Western novelist (+ 1939)
• May 31 - Heath Robinson, British cartoonist/illustrator (+ 1944)
• June 27 - Paul Laurence Dunbar (+ 1906)
• August 24 - Max Beerbohm (+ 1956)

Deaths

• January 21 - Franz Grillparzer, poet and dramatist
• March 4- Johannes Carsten Hauch, poet
• March 10 - Giuseppe Mazzini, philosopher
• April 1 - Frederick Maurice, theologian
• April 20 - Ljudevit Gaj, linguist and journalist
• May 13 - Moritz Hartmann, poet
• June 1 - Charles Lever, novelist
• August 8 - Heinrich Abeken, theologian
• October 21 - Jean-Henri Merle d'Aubigné, historian
• November 16 - William Gilham, military writer
• December 23 - Théophile Gautier, poet, novelist

Awards