See also: 1849 in literature, other events of 1850, 1851 in literature, list of years in literature.
Events
- Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) named Poet Laureate of England.
- Periodical Household Words begins publication
- Henrik Ibsen's first play, The Burial Mound, is produced
New Books
- Antonina - Wilkie Collins
- The Arabian Nights - Sir Richard Burton
- The Black Tulip - Alexandre Dumas, père
- Dictionary of the Norwegian Dialects - Ivar Aasen
- Linda - Caroline Lee Hentz
- A Month in the Country - Ivan Turgenev
- The Peasant War in Germany - Friedrich Engels
- Rena, the Snowbird - Caroline Lee Hentz
- The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Sonnets from the Portuguese (Poetry) - Elizabeth Barrett Browning
- Tales of City Life - Catharine Maria Sedgwick
- Tristan le Roux - Alexandre Dumas, fils
- La Vendee - Anthony Trollope
- White-Jacket - Herman Melville
- The Wide, Wide World - Susan Warner
Births
- January 15 - Mihai Eminescu, poet
- February 8 - Kate Chopin, author
- June 27 - Lafcadio Hearn, writer
- June 27 - Ivan Vazov, poet, novelist and playwright
- August 5 - Guy de Maupassant, writer
- November 5 - Ella Wheeler Wilcox, poet and journalist
- November 13 - Robert Louis Stevenson, novelist
Deaths
- January 20 - Adam Oehlenschlager, poet
- April 23 - William Wordsworth, poet
- May 31 - Giuseppe Giusti, poet
- July 19 - Sarah Margaret Fuller, writer
- August 18 - Honoré de Balzac, novelist
- August 22 - Nikolaus Lenau, poet
- December 24 - Frederic Bastiat, philosopher and author