1863 in literature

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