1763 in literature

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

Events

 * 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.
 * unknown dates
 * Fedor Emin's Nepostoyannaya fortuna, the first Russian novel, is published.
 * 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).

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 (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

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

Non-fiction

 * 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

Births

 * 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)
 * Shen Fu, Chinese chronicler (died c. 1825)

Deaths

 * 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)
 * 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)