1839 in literature

The year 1839 in literature involved some significant new books.

Events

 * Washington Irving begins contributing regularly to The Knickerbocker, and will publish thirty new pieces in the magazine — including "The Creole Village," in which he will coin the phrase "the almighty dollar" — through March 1841.
 * John Roberton's pseudo-medical work On Diseases of the Generative System (1811) is declared to be indecent and becomes the centre of the important British constitutional case of Stockdale v. Hansard.

New fiction

 * William Harrison Ainsworth - Jack Sheppard
 * Charles Dickens - Nicholas Nickleby
 * Frederick Marryat -
 * Diary in America
 * The Phantom Ship
 * Harriet Martineau - Deerbrook
 * Edgar Allan Poe -
 * "The Fall of the House of Usher"
 * "William Wilson"
 * Jules Sandeau - Marianna
 * Stendhal - The Charterhouse of Parma
 * Philip Meadows Taylor - Confessions of a Thug

New drama

 * Felicia Hemans - De Chatillon

Poetry

 * Henry Wadsworth Longfellow -
 * Hyperion
 * Voices of the Night

Non-fiction

 * Louis Blanc - L'Organisation du Travail
 * Charles Darwin - The Voyage of the Beagle
 * George W. M. Reynolds - Grace Darling; or, the Heroine of the Ferne Islands
 * Jared Sparks - Life of Washington
 * John Tallis - Tallis Directory

Births

 * January 7 - Ouida, English novelist (d. 1908)
 * February 1 - James Herne, American dramatist (d. 1901)
 * February 22 - Francis Pharcellus Church, American editor and publisher (d. 1906)
 * March 16 - Sully Prudhomme, French poet and essayist, winner of the first Nobel Prize in Literature (d. 1907)
 * April 18 - Henry Kendall, Australian poet (d. 1882)
 * June 21 - Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Brazilian poet and novelist (d. 1908)
 * August 4 - Walter Pater, English writer (d. 1894)
 * August 9 - Gaston Paris, French writer and scholar (d. 1903)
 * September 10 - Charles Sanders Peirce, American philosopher (d. 1914)
 * November 29 - Ludwig Anzengruber, Austrian dramatist (d. 1889)

Deaths

 * April 11 - John Galt, Scottish novelist (b. 1779)
 * May 17 - Archibald Alison, Scottish author (b. 1757)
 * May 21 - José María Heredia y Campuzano, Cuban poet (b. 1803)
 * September 4 - Hermann Olshausen, German theologian (b. 1796)

Awards

 * Newdigate prize - John Ruskin