1763 in literature

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.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
unknown dates
- Fedor Emin's Nepostoyannaya fortuna, the first Russian novel, is published.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
- 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

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)<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
- 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)<ref name="Cismaru1977">Template:Cite book</ref>
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)