1759 in literature

Events

• By January 15 – Voltaire's satirical novel Candide, ou l'Optimisme is published simultaneously in five countries.
• January 15 – The British Museum opens in London.
• August 12 – In the Seven Years' War Battle of Kunersdorf, the German poet Major Ewald Christian von Kleist is fatally injured.
• December – Laurence Sterne has the first two volumes of his comic metafictional novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman printed in York, in a shop owned by Ann Ward.
• Denis Diderot's Encyclopédie is temporarily suppressed by the French government.
• Rev. Hugh Blair begins to teach a course on the principles of literary composition at the University of Edinburgh, the first held in the field of English literature.
• Johann Ernst Immanuel Walch becomes a professor of rhetoric and poetry at the University of Jena.

• The earliest known professional performance of Shakespeare's Hamlet in North America is given by the American Company in Philadelphia, with Lewis Hallam Jr. as Hamlet.
• The writer and critic William Warburton becomes the Anglican Bishop of Gloucester.

  New books

Fiction

• Anonymous – The History of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen-House
• Sarah Fielding – The History of the Countess of Dellwyn
• Samuel Johnson – The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia.
• Gotthold Lessing – Fables
• Madame Riccoboni – Lettres de Milady Juliette Catesby
• William Rider – Candidus
• Laurence Sterne – The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, vols 1–2
• Voltaire – Candide

  Drama

• William Hawkins – Cymbeline
• Arthur Murphy – The Orphan of China
• James Townley – High Life Below Stairs

  Poetry

• Samuel Butler – The Genuine Remains
• Edward Capell – Prolusions
• John Gilbert Cooper – Ver-Vert
• William Mason – Caractacus
• Augustus Montague Toplady – Poems on Sacred Subjects

  Non-fiction

• Franz Aepinus – Tentamen Theoriae Electricitatis et Magnetismi
• Edmund Burke – The Annual Register
• Angélique du Coudray – Abrégé de l'art des accouchements
• Alexander Gerard – An Essay on Taste
• Oliver Goldsmith
• *The Bee
• *An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe
• David Hume – The History of England, Under the House of Tudor
• Richard Hurd – Moral and Political Dialogues
• Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon – The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon Written by Himself
• Rai Chatar Man Kayath – Chahar Gulshan
• William Robertson – The History of Scotland during the Reigns of Queen Mary and of King James
• Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments
• Arthur Young – Reflections on the Present State of Affairs at Home and Abroad
• Edward Young – Conjectures on Original Composition

  Births

• January 25 – Robert Burns, Scottish poet writing in Braid Scots and English
• March 5 – John Jamieson, Scottish lexicographer
• March 29 – Alexander Chalmers, Scottish biographer and editor
• April 27 – Mary Wollstonecraft, English political writer and advocate of women's rights
• May 4 – Isabella Kelly, Scottish novelist and poet
• June 17 – Helen Maria Williams, English novelist, poet and translator from French
• October 13 – Mary Hays, English writer and advocate of women's rights
• November 10 – Friedrich Schiller, German poet and dramatist
• December 25 – Richard Porson, English classicist

• Deen Mahomet, author of first book in English by an Indian

  Deaths

• June 12 – William Collins, English poet
• June 26 – Arthur Young, English religious writer and cleric
• July 27 – Pierre Louis Maupertuis, French philosopher
• July 29 – Kata Bethlen, Hungarian memoirist and correspondent
• August 16 – Eugene Aram, English philologist and murderer, hanged
• August 24 – Ewald Christian von Kleist, German poet
• September 5 – Lauritz de Thurah, Danish architectural historian
• October 7 – Joseph Ames, English bibliographer and antiquary

• Anton Wilhelm Amo, West African-born German philosopher