1763 in literature

Events

• January – Christopher Smart's asylum confinement ends at Mr Potter's asylum in London. While confined, Smart has written A Song to David, published this year, and Jubilate Agno, not published until 1939.
• April 30 – A warrant is issued in Britain for the arrest of John Wilkes for seditious writings in The North Briton
• May 16 – James Boswell is introduced to Samuel Johnson at Thomas Davies's bookshop in Covent Garden, London.
• October 11 – The marriage of Henry Thrale and Hester Thrale takes place. Both later become close friends and companions of Dr Samuel Johnson.
• Fedor Emin writes Nepostoyannaya fortuna, the first Russian novel.
• The atheist English printer John Baskerville produces an edition of The Holy Bible for Cambridge University Press in his Baskerville typeface.
• Approximate date – Chinese Qing dynasty scholar Sun Zhu compiles Three Hundred Tang Poems, an anthology of poems from the Chinese Tang dynasty.

  New books

Prose

• Frances Brooke – The History of Lady Julia Mandeville
• James Grieve – English translation of Stepan Krasheninnikov's History of Kamtschatka
• Susannah Minifie and Margaret Minifie – The Histories of Lady Frances S—— and Lady Caroline S——
• John Langhorne – The Letters that Passed Between Theodosius and Constantia
• Cao Xueqin – The Chronicles of the Stone

  Drama

• Isaac Bickerstaffe – Love in a Village
• George Colman the Elder – The Deuce is in Him
• Nicolás Fernandez de Moratín – Lucrecia
• Samuel Foote
• *The Mayor of Garrett
• *The Trial of Samuel Foote, Esq. for a Libel on Peter Paragraph
• Mary Latter – The Siege of Jerusalem
• David Mallet – Elvira
• Arthur Murphy – The Citizen
• Frances Sheridan – The Discovery

  Poetry

• Richard Bentley the Younger – Patriotism
• Charles Churchill
• *The Author
• *The Conference
• *An Epistle to William Hogarth
• *The Prophecy of Famine
• *Poems
• John Collier – Tim Bobbin's Toy-shop
• George Keate – The Alps
• Robert Lloyd – The Death of Adam
• James Macpherson – Temora
• William Mason – Elegies
• James Merrick – Poems
• Giuseppe Parini – Il giorno
• Christopher Smart – A Song to David

  Non-fiction

• Almanach de Gotha
• John Ash – Grammatical Institutes
• Thomas Bayes – An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances
• Hugh Blair – A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian
• John Brown – A Dissertation on Poetry and Music
• Philip Doddridge – A Course of Lectures on the Principal Subjects in Pneumatology, Ethics, and Divinity
• Immanuel Kant – The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God
• Antoine Simon Le Page Du Pratz – History of Louisiana; an English translation, in two volumes, of Histoire de la Louisiane, published in 1758
• Catharine Macaulay – The History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line
• Mary Wortley Montagu – Letters
• Robert Orme – A History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan from the Year 1745
• William Williams Pantycelyn – Atteb Philo-Evangelius i Martha Philopur
• Emanuel Swedenborg – Doctrine of Holy Scripture
• Henry Venn – The Complete Duty of Man
• Voltaire – Traité sur la tolérance
• William Warburton – The Doctrine of Grace
• John Wesley – A Survey of the Wisdom of God in the Creation

  Births

• January 15 – François-Joseph Talma, French actor
• January 29 – Johann Gottfried Seume, German travel writer
• March 9 – William Cobbett, English political and economic writer
• March 16 – Mary Berry, English dramatist and correspondent
• March 21 – Jean Paul, German novelist
• May 9 – János Batsányi, Hungarian poet and anti-Habsburg activist
• June 15 – Kobayashi Issa, Japanese haiku poet
• July 30 – Samuel Rogers, English poet
• September 2 – Caroline Schelling, German literary critic
• October 10 – Xavier de Maistre, French soldier and writer
• December 6 – Mary Anne Burges, Scottish religious allegorist
• Unknown dates
• *Huang Peilie, Chinese bibliophile
• *Shen Fu, Chinese chronicler

  Deaths

• January 11 – Caspar Abel, German poet and theologian
• February 11 – William Shenstone, English poet
• June 29 – Hedvig Charlotta Nordenflycht, Swedish poet and salonnière
• September 26 – John Byrom, English poet
• December 23 – Antoine François Prévost, French author
• Probable year of death – Cao Xueqin, Chinese novelist