1887 in literature

The year 1887 in literature involved some significant new books.

Events

 * Futabatei Shimei writes The Drifting Cloud, the first modern novel in Japan.

New books

 * Mary Elizabeth Braddon - Cut by the County
 * Hall Caine - The Deemster
 * Marie Corelli - Thelma
 * F. Marion Crawford - Saracinesca
 * Anna Bowman Dodd - The Republic of the Future
 * Arthur Conan Doyle - A Study in Scarlet
 * Benito Pérez Galdós - Fortunata y Jacinta
 * Enrique Gaspar - El anacronópete, the first work of fiction to feature a time machine
 * H. Rider Haggard - Allan Quatermain
 * Jess
 * She
 * Thomas Hardy - The Woodlanders
 * W. H. Hudson - A Crystal Age
 * Joris-Karl Huysmans - En rade
 * Paolo Mantegazza - Testa
 * Appu Nedungadi - Kundalatha
 * José Rizal - Noli Me Tangere
 * Futabatei Shimei - The Drifting Cloud
 * August Strindberg - Hemsöborna
 * Jules Verne
 * The Flight to France
 * North Against South
 * Emile Zola - La Terre

New drama

 * Anton Chekhov - Ivanov
 * August Strindberg - The Father

Non-fiction

 * Mikhail Bakunin - God and the State
 * Hall Caine - Life of Samuel Coleridge Taylor
 * Charles Darwin - The Autobiography of Charles Darwin (posthumously published)
 * Franz Hartmann - The Life of Philippus Theophrastus Bombast of Hohenheim, better known by the name of Paracelsus, and the substance of his teachings.
 * Friedrich Nietzsche - On the Genealogy of Morality
 * L. L. Zamenhof - Unua Libro

Births

 * February 1 - Charles Nordhoff, author (died 1947)
 * February 3 - Georg Trakl, poet (d. 1914)
 * February 11  - John van Melle, South African writer (d. 1953)
 * February 18 - Nikos Kazantzakis, poet (d. 1957)
 * March 3 - Rupert Brooke, poet (d. 1915)
 * March 14 - Sylvia Beach, publisher (d. 1962)
 * June 2 - Orrick Johns, poet & playwright (d. 1946)
 * September 1 - Blaise Cendrars, writer (d. 1961)

Deaths

 * February 10 - Mrs Henry Wood, novelist (born 1814)
 * April 23 - John Ceiriog Hughes, poet (b. 1832)
 * May 4 - William Murdoch, poet (b. 1823)
 * August 20 - Jules Laforgue, French poet (b. 1860)
 * October 12 - Dinah Craik, novelist and poet (b. 1826)
 * November 2 - Alfred Domett, poet (b. 1811)
 * November 19 - Emma Lazarus, American poet (b. 1849)
 * December 5 - Eliza Roxcy Snow, American poet (b. 1804)
 * date unknown
 * Frances Browne, poet and novelist (b. 1816)
 * Emilia Tennyson, sister of Alfred Tennyson and fiancée of Arthur Hallam (b. 1811)