1821 in literature

Events

• August 4 – Atkinson & Alexander publish The Saturday Evening Post for the first time as a weekly newspaper in the United States.
• James Ballantyne begins publishing his Novelist's Library in Edinburgh edited by Sir Walter Scott.
• Percy Bysshe Shelley's Queen Mab: a philosophical poem is distributed by an unauthorized publisher in London leading to prosecution by the Society for the Prevention of Vice.
• In the first known obscenity case in the United States, a Massachusetts court outlaws the John Cleland novel Fanny Hill. The publisher, Peter Holmes, is convicted for printing a "lewd and obscene" novel.
• At about this date Sunthorn Phu is imprisoned and begins his epic poem Phra Aphai Mani.

  New books

Fiction

• James Fenimore Cooper – The Spy
• Pierce Egan – Life in London; Boxiana Vol. III
• John Galt
• *Annals of the Parish
• *The Ayrshire Legatees
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years
• Ann Hatton – Lovers and Friends
• Hannah Maria Jones – Gretna Green
• Charles Nodier – Smarra
• Anna Maria Porter – The Village of Mariendorpt
• Jane Porter – The Scottish Chiefs
• Sir Walter Scott – Kenilworth

  Children

• Maria Hack – Harry Beaufoy; or the Pupil of Nature
• Thomas Love Peacock – Maid Marian

  Drama

• Lord Byron
• *Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice
• *Sardanapalus: a tragedy; The Two Foscari: a tragedy; Cain: a mystery
• Alexandre-Vincent Pineux Duval – Le Faux Bonhomme
• Aleksander Fredro – Pan Geldhab
• Franz Grillparzer – :de:Das goldene Vlies|Das goldene Vliess
• Heinrich von Kleist – The Prince of Homburg

  Poetry

• Heinrich Heine – Poems
• Alessandro Manzoni – Il Cinque Maggio
• Percy Bysshe Shelley – Adonaïs

  Non-fiction

• James Burney – An Essay, by Way of Lecture, on the Game of Whist
• Owen Chase – Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex
• William Cobbett – The American Gardener
• George Grote – Statement of the Question of Parliamentary Reform
• William Hazlitt – Table-Talk
• James Mill – Elements of Political Economy
• John Roberton – Kalogynomia, or the Laws of Female Beauty
• Robert Southey – Life of Cromwell

  Births

• March 19 – Richard Francis Burton, English polymath
• March 20 – Ned Buntline, American publisher, dime novelist and publicist
• March 25 – Isabella Banks, English poet and novelist
• April 9 – Charles Baudelaire, French poet
• May 8 – Charlotte Maria Tucker, English children's writer
• June 30 – William Hepworth Dixon, English historian, traveler and journal editor
• October 30 – Fyodor Dostoevsky, Russian novelist
• November 28 – Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov, Russian poet, writer and critic
• September 21 – Aurora Ljungstedt, Swedish horror writer
• December 6 – Dora Greenwell, English poet
• December 12 – Gustave Flaubert, French novelist

Deaths

• January 14 – Jens Zetlitz, Norwegian poet
• February 23 – John Keats, English poet
• February 26 – Joseph de Maistre, Savoyard philosopher
• March 17 – Louis-Marcelin de Fontanes, French poet
• April 16 – Thomas Scott, English cleric and religious writer
• May 2 – Hester Thrale, English diarist and arts patron
• May 22 – Johann Georg Heinrich Feder, German philosopher
• August 1 – Elizabeth Inchbald, English novelist and dramatist
• November 17 – James Burney, English rear-admiral and naval writer

  Awards

• Chancellor's Gold Medal and Newdigate Prize – George Howard