1876 in literature

Events

• February 24 – The stage première of the verse-play Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen with incidental music by Edvard Grieg, takes place in Christiania, Norway.
• February/March – The Harvard Lampoon humor magazine is founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
• March 14 – Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma established in Rome.
• March – The American librarian Melvil Dewey first publishes the Dewey Decimal Classification system.
• April – Émile Zola's L'Assommoir begins serialization in Le Bien public. Its low-life themes cause it to be suspended after six episodes; serialization resumes in July in La République des lettres.
• July – William Heffer takes over his first bookshop in Cambridge, primarily as a stationer at this date.
• December – The first United States edition of Mark Twain's first individual extended work of fiction, the Bildungsroman The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, illustrated by True Williams, is published by the American Publishing Company. An authorised non-illustrated British edition has appeared in early June from Chatto & Windus in London and pirated editions have appeared in Canada and Germany.

• The first edition of Christopher Marlowe's play Edward II is discovered.
• The Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord opens in Paris.

  New books

Fiction

• W. H. Ainsworth
• *Chetwynd Calverley
• *The Leaguer of Lathom
• Machado de Assis – Helena
• Isabella Banks – The Manchester Man
• Walter Besant and James Rice – The Golden Butterfly
• Rhoda Broughton – Joan
• Robert Buchanan – The Shadow of the Sword
• Wilkie Collins – The Two Destinies
• Alphonse Daudet – Jack
• Fyodor Dostoevsky – A Gentle Creature
• George Eliot – Daniel Deronda
• Benito Pérez Galdós – Doña Perfecta
• John Habberton – Helen's Babies
• Thomas Hardy – The Hand of Ethelberta
• Joris-Karl Huysmans – Martha
• Jens Peter Jacobsen – Fru Marie Grubbe
• Herman Melville – Clarel
• Anthony Trollope – The Prime Minister
• Jules Verne – Michael Strogoff
• Charlotte M. Yonge – The Three Brides
• Émile Zola – Son Excellence Eugène Rougon

  Children and young people

• Louisa May Alcott – Rose in Bloom
• Mark Twain – The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

  Drama

• Émile Augier – Madame Caverlet
• Rosario de Acuña – Rienzi el tribuno
• W. S. Gilbert – Dan'l Druce, Blacksmith
• Henrik Ibsen – Peer Gynt

  Poetry

• Lewis Carroll – The Hunting of the Snark
• Edward Lear – Laughable Lyrics
• Julia A. Moore – The Sentimental Song Book

  Non-fiction

• Michael Foster – Textbook of Physiology
• William Ewart Gladstone – Bulgarian Horrors
• Professor Louis Hoffmann – Modern Magic
• Søren Kierkegaard – Judge for Yourselves!
• Friedrich Nietzsche – Untimely Meditations
• Robert's Rules of Order
• George Smith – The Chaldean Account of Genesis

  Births

• January 4 – Paola Drigo, Italian writer
• January 12 – Jack London, American writer
• February 11 – Mary Frances Dowdall, English novelist and non-fiction writer
• February 16 – G. M. Trevelyan, English historian
• March 4 – Léon-Paul Fargue, French poet
• April 13 – Sidney Bradshaw Fay American historian
• April 22 – Ole Edvart Rolvaag, Norwegian-American writer
• May 10 – Ivan Cankar, Slovene dramatist and poet
• June 2 – Konstantin Trenyov, Russian dramatist
• July 1 – Susan Glaspell, American playwright and novelist
• July 12 – Max Jacob, French poet
• September 13 – Sherwood Anderson, American novelist
• October 31 – Natalie Clifford Barney, American writer and patron
• November 1 – Anne de Noailles, French writer
• December 22 – Thomas Mofolo, Sotho novelist

  Deaths

• January 7 – Juste Olivier, Swiss poet
• January 19 – George Julius Poulett Scrope, English political economist
• February 1 – Meenakshi Sundaram Pillai, Tamil scholar and poet
• February 3 – Gino Capponi, Italian historian
• February 6 – Georgiana Chatterton, English novelist and travel writer
• February 27 – Afanasy Shchapov, Russian historian
• March 2 – Johannes Falke, German historian
• May 7 – William Buell Sprague, American biographer
• May 13 – Joshua Hobson, English pamphleteer
• May 24 – Henry Kingsley, English novelist
• May 26 – František Palacký, Czech historian
• June 8 – George Sand, French novelist
• June 14 – Catherine Crowe, English novelist and children's writer
• June 20 – John Neal, American novelist and critic
• June 27 – Harriet Martineau, English philosopher and social theorist
• July 14 – James Henry, Irish poet and scholar
• July 24 – John William Kaye, English military historian
• July 25 – Robert Caesar Childers, French-born English orientalist
• October 7 – Georg Heinrich Pertz, German historian
• November 24 – Maria Francesca Rossetti, English critic and translator
• November 28 – Chandos Wren-Hoskyns, English agricultural writer and landowner
• December 30 – Christian Winther, Danish lyric poet