1878 in literature

Events

• January 28 – The Yale News becomes the first daily college newspaper in the United States.
• June – Robert Louis Stevenson's three linked detective fiction short stories The Suicide Club featuring Prince Florizel begin publication in The London Magazine.
• June 10 – Konrad Korzeniowski, the future English-language novelist Joseph Conrad, sets foot on British soil for the first time, at Lowestoft from the SS Mavis.
• July – The Scottish poetaster William McGonagall, a self-described "poet and tragedian", journeys on foot from Dundee to Balmoral Castle over mountainous terrain and through a thunderstorm in a fruitless attempt to perform his verse before Queen Victoria.
• August 3 – Guy de Maupassant writes to Gustave Flaubert, complaining about his monotonous life and his new job as an employee of the Ministry of Public Instruction in France.
• October – The Peabody Institute Library opens to the public in Baltimore, Maryland.
• December 30 – Henry Irving's production of Hamlet, with himself in the title rôle playing opposite Ellen Terry as Ophelia, opens at the Lyceum Theatre, London.

• The Johns Hopkins University Press is established in Baltimore, Maryland, as the University Publication Agency, making it the oldest continuously operating university press in the United States.
• The Remington No. 2 typewriter, the first with a shift key enabling production of lower as well as upper case characters, is introduced in the United States.

  New books

Fiction

• W. Harrison Ainsworth – Beatrice Tyldesley
• Rebecca Agatha Armour – Lady Rosamond's Secret. A Romance of Fredericton
• Walter Besant and James Rice – The Monks of Thelema
• Mary Elizabeth Braddon – An Open Verdict
• Ellen Buckingham Mathews – Cherry Ripe
• Wilkie Collins – The Haunted Hotel
• Theodor Fontane – Vor dem Sturm
• Anna Katharine Green – The Leavenworth Case
• Thomas Hardy – The Return of the Native
• Henry James
• *Daisy Miller
• *The Europeans
• William Hurrell Mallock
• * The New Paul and Virginia
• * The New Republic
• Margaret Oliphant – The Primrose Path
• José Maria de Eça de Queiroz – Cousin Bazilio
• Anne Eliza Smith – Seola
• Harriet Beecher Stowe – Poganuc People: Their Loves and Lives
• Leo Tolstoy – Anna Karenina
• Émile Zola – Une Page d'amour

  Children and young people

• Randolph Caldecott – The House that Jack Built
• Hector Malot – Sans Famille
• Jules Verne – Dick Sand, A Captain at Fifteen
• Evelyn Whitaker – Miss Toosey's Mission. A Tale

  Drama

• José Echegaray – En el pilar y en la cruz

  Poetry

• Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy – The Dream of Councillor Popov

  Non-fiction

• François Callet – Tantara ny Andriana eto Madagasikara
• Richard Jefferies – The Gamekeeper at Home
• Friedrich Nietzsche – Human, All Too Human
• Robert Louis Stevenson – An Inland Voyage

  Births

• January 4 – A. E. Coppard, English short story writer and poet
• January 6 – Carl Sandburg, American poet and historian
• January 12 – Ferenc Molnár, Hungarian playwright and novelist
• March 14 – Victor Bridges, English novelist, playwright and poet
• April 15 – Robert Walser, Swiss author and poet writing in German
• June 1 – John Masefield, English poet
• June 12 – James Oliver Curwood, American author
• August 2 – Berta Ruck, Indian-born Welsh romantic novelist
• August 10 – Louis Esson, Scottish-born Australian poet and playwright
• September 20 – Upton Sinclair, American novelist
• September 22 – F. J. Harvey Darton English children's literature historian and publisher
• November 25 – Georg Kaiser, German dramatist (died 1945

  Deaths

• January 19 – Ede Szigligeti, Hungarian dramatist
• February 1 – George Cruikshank, English illustrator
• April 24 – Heinrich Leo, Prussian historian
• April 25 – Anna Sewell, English novelist
• May 28 – Sophie de Choiseul-Gouffier, Lithuanian novelist
• July 1 – Catherine Winkworth, English translator
• August 13
• *George Gilfillan, Scottish poet and author
• *Elizabeth Prentiss, American poet and hymnist
• November 3 – Frances Freeling Broderip, English children's writer
• November 17 – Karl Theodor Keim, German theologian
• December 5 – George Whyte-Melville, Scottish-born novelist
• December 19 – Bayard Taylor, American poet
• December 31 – Giulietta Pezzi, Italian novelist, journalist, and poet

  Awards

• Newdigate prize – Oscar Wilde, ":it:Ravenna |Ravenna"