1763 in literature

The following literary events and publications occurred in the year 1763.

• January – Christopher Smart's asylum confinement ends at Mr Potter's asylum in London. (He was admitted to St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics in May 1757 and may have been confined before that; he was later moved to Potter's.) 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.
• December 6 – John Wilkes brings a court action for trespass against Robert Wood, after the Lord Chief Justice rules that parliamentary privilege protects Wilkes from arrest for libel.^[1]
• unknown dates
  • Fedor Emin's Nepostoyannaya fortuna, the first Russian novel, is published.^[2]
  • The atheist English printer John Baskerville produces an edition of The Holy Bible for Cambridge University Press in his Baskerville typeface.
• probable – Chinese Qing dynasty scholar Sun Zhu compiles Three Hundred Tang Poems, an anthology of poems from the Chinese Tang dynasty (618–907).

• 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

• Isaac Bickerstaffe – Love in a Village (opera)
• 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
  • The Dupe

• 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 (as Ossian) – Temora
• William Mason – Elegies
• James Merrick – Poems
• Giuseppe Parini – Il giorno
• Christopher Smart – A Song to David

• Almanach de Gotha (first issue)
• John Ash – Grammatical Institutes
• Thomas Bayes (died 1761) – 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 (Philo-Evangelius's Reply to 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

• January 15 – François-Joseph Talma, French actor (died 1826)
• January 29 – Johann Gottfried Seume, German travel writer (died 1810)
• March 9 – William Cobbett, English political and economic writer (died 1835)
• March 16 – Mary Berry, English dramatist and correspondent (died 1852)
• March 21 – Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter), German novelist (died 1825)
• May 9 – János Batsányi, Hungarian poet and anti-Habsburg activist (died 1845)
• June 15 – Kobayashi Issa, Japanese haiku poet (died 1828)
• July 30 – Samuel Rogers, English poet (died 1855)
• September 2 – Caroline Schelling (Caroline Michaelis), German literary critic (died 1809)
• October 10 – Xavier de Maistre, French soldier and writer (died 1852)
• December 6 – Mary Anne Burges, Scottish religious allegorist (died 1813)
• Unknown dates
  • Huang Peilie, Chinese bibliophile (died 1825)^[3]
  • Shen Fu, Chinese chronicler (died c. 1825)

• January 11 – Caspar Abel, German poet and theologian (born 1676)
• February 11 – William Shenstone, English poet (born 1714)
• February 12 – Pierre de Marivaux, French novelist and dramatist (born 1688)^[4]
• May 3 – George Psalmanazar, French-born impostor and English writer (born c. 1679)
• June 29 – Hedvig Charlotta Nordenflycht, Swedish poet and salonnière (born 1718)
• September 26 – John Byrom, English poet (born 1692)
• December 23 – Antoine François Prévost (Abbé Prévost), French author (born 1697)
• Probable year of death – Cao Xueqin, Chinese novelist (born c. 1715)