1759 in literature

• By January 15 – Voltaire's satirical novella Candide, ou l'Optimisme is published simultaneously in five countries.
• January 15 – The British Museum opens in London.
• March 5 – Denis Diderot's Encyclopédie is proscribed by the Vatican and (on March 8) temporarily suppressed by the French government. The ban is lifted in September to allow publication of a revised version.^[1]
• July 27 – The earliest known professional performance of Shakespeare's Hamlet in North America (in Garrick's version) is given by the American Company in Philadelphia, with Lewis Hallam Jr. as Hamlet.^[2]
• August 12 – In the Seven Years' War Battle of Kunersdorf, the German poet Major Ewald Christian von Kleist is fatally injured.
• December – Laurence Sterne has the first two volumes of his comic metafictional novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman printed in York, in a shop owned by Ann Ward.
• December 22 – The writer and critic William Warburton is nominated Anglican Bishop of Gloucester.^[3]
• unknown dates
  • Rev. Hugh Blair begins to teach a course on the principles of literary composition at the University of Edinburgh, the first held in the field of English literature.^[4]
  • Johann Ernst Immanuel Walch becomes a professor of rhetoric and poetry at the University of Jena.

Fiction

• Anonymous – The History of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen-House (dated 1760)
• Sarah Fielding – The History of the Countess of Dellwyn
• Samuel Johnson – The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (on Wikisource).
• Gotthold Lessing – Fables
• Madame Riccoboni – Lettres de Milady Juliette Catesby
• William Rider – Candidus (translation of Candide)
• Laurence Sterne – The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, vols 1–2
• Voltaire – Candide

Drama

• William Hawkins – Cymbeline (adapted from William Shakespeare)
• Arthur Murphy – The Orphan of China
• James Townley – High Life Below Stairs

Poetry

• Samuel Butler – The Genuine Remains (collected works)
• Edward Capell – Prolusions
• John Gilbert Cooper – Ver-Vert (transl.)
• William Mason – Caractacus
• Augustus Montague Toplady – Poems on Sacred Subjects

Non-fiction

• Franz Aepinus – Tentamen Theoriae Electricitatis et Magnetismi (An Attempt at a Theory of Electricity and Magnetism)
• Edmund Burke – The Annual Register
• Angélique du Coudray – Abrégé de l'art des accouchements (The Art of Obstetrics)
• Alexander Gerard – An Essay on Taste
• Oliver Goldsmith
  • The Bee (periodical solely by Goldsmith)
  • An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe
• David Hume – The History of England, Under the House of Tudor
• Richard Hurd – Moral and Political Dialogues
• Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon – The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon Written by Himself
• Rai Chatar Man Kayath – Chahar Gulshan
• William Robertson – The History of Scotland during the Reigns of Queen Mary and of King James
• Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments
• Arthur Young – Reflections on the Present State of Affairs at Home and Abroad
• Edward Young – Conjectures on Original Composition

• January 25 – Robert Burns, Scottish poet writing in Braid Scots and English (died 1796)^[5]
• March 5 – John Jamieson, Scottish lexicographer (died 1838)^[6]
• March 29 – Alexander Chalmers, Scottish biographer and editor (died 1834)
• April 27 – Mary Wollstonecraft, English political writer and advocate of women's rights (died 1797)^[7]
• May 4 (baptism) – Isabella Kelly, Scottish novelist and poet (died 1857)^[8]
• June 17 – Helen Maria Williams, English novelist, poet and translator from French (died 1827)
• October 13 – Mary Hays, English writer and advocate of women's rights (died 1843)
• November 10 – Friedrich Schiller, German poet and dramatist (died 1805)
• December 25 – Richard Porson, English classicist (died 1808)
• unknown date – Deen Mahomet, author of first book in English by an Indian (died 1851)^[9]

• June 12 – William Collins, English poet (born 1721)
• June 26 – Arthur Young, English religious writer and cleric (born 1693)
• July 27 – Pierre Louis Maupertuis, French philosopher (born 1698)
• July 29 – Kata Bethlen, Hungarian memoirist and correspondent (born 1700)
• August 16 – Eugene Aram, English philologist and murderer, hanged (born 1704)
• August 24 – Ewald Christian von Kleist, German poet (born 1715)
• September 5 – Lauritz de Thurah, Danish architectural historian (born 1706)
• October 7 – Joseph Ames, English bibliographer and antiquary (born 1680)
• unknown date – Francis Coventry, English clergyman and novelist (born 1725)^[10]
• probable – Anton Wilhelm Amo, West African-born German philosopher (born 1703)