1779 in literature

• April 6 – The premiėre of Iphigenie auf Tauris by Johann Wolfgang Goethe is held at the private Ducal Palace in Weimar.^[1]
• October 8 – William Blake enrols as a student with the Royal Academy of Arts at Somerset House in London.^[2]

Fiction

• Richard Graves – Columella
• Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi – Woldemar
• Ignacy Krasicki – Fables and Parables (Bajki i przypowieści)
• Nocturnal Revels
• Samuel Jackson Pratt as "Courtney Melmoth"
  • Shenstone-Green
  • The Tutor of Truth
• The Sorrows of Werther (anonymous translation of a Johann Wolfgang von Goethe work)

Children

• Joachim Heinrich Campe – Robinson der Jüngere (based on Defoe)

Drama

• Fanny Burney – The Witlings (unpublished)
• Hannah Cowley
  • Albina, Countess Raimond
  • Who's the Dupe?
• Richard Cumberland – Calypso
• Hugh Downman – Lucius Junius Brutus
• Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian – Les Deux Billets
• William Hodson – Zoraida
• Robert Jephson – The Law of Lombardy
• Gotthold Ephraim Lessing – Nathan der Weise (published)
• Hannah More – The Fatal Falsehood
• Elizabeth Richardson – The Double Deception
• Richard Brinsley Sheridan – The Critic

Poetry

• William Cowper and John Newton – Olney Hymns
• Robert Fergusson – Poems
• William Hayley – Epistle to Admiral Keppel
• Ann Murry – Poems
• Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos – Epístola de Jovino a Anfriso, escrita desde el Paular
• Leandro Fernandez de Moratín – La toma de Granada por los Reyes Católicos don Fernando y doña Isabel
• Tomás de Iriarte – La música

Non-fiction

• John Abercrombie – The British Fruit Gardener and Art of Pruning
• Anna Barbauld – Lessons for Children
• James Burnett – Antient Metaphysics
• Edward Capell – Notes and Various Readings to Shakespeare
• George Chalmers – Political Annals of the Present United Colonies
• Edward Gibbon – A Vindication of Some Passages in the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
• David Hume (died 1776; anonymously) – Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
• Samuel Johnson – Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets
• Vicessimus Knox – Essays
• Franz Mesmer – Mémoire sur la découverte du magnétisme animal
• John Moore – A View of Society and Manners in France, Switzerland, and Germany
• Thomas Scott – The Force of Truth
• Horace Walpole – A Letter to the Editor of the Miscellanies of Thomas Chatterton

• January 18 – Peter Mark Roget, English lexicographer (died 1869)
• March 1 – Gottfried Weber, German writer on music (died 1839)
• March 3 – Matthäus Casimir von Collin, Austrian poet and dramatist (died 1824)
• March 10 – Frances Trollope (born Frances Milton), English novelist and writer (died 1863)
• March 30 – Antoine Ó Raifteiri, Irish Gaelic poet (died 1835)
• May 2 – John Galt, Scottish novelist and entrepreneur (died 1839)^[3]
• May 28 – Thomas Moore, Irish poet and songwriter (died 1852)
• August 1 – Francis Scott Key, American poet (died 1843)
• September 10 – Alexander Voeykov, Russian poet (died 1839)
• November 14 – Adam Oehlenschläger, Danish Romantic poet and dramatist (died 1850)
• December 22 – Thomas Gaisford, English classicist (died 1855)
• December 31 – Horace (Horatio) Smith, English poet and novelist (died 1849)^[4]

• January 20 – David Garrick, English dramatist, actor and impresario (born 1717)^[5]
• March 4 – Heinrich Leopold Wagner, German dramatist (born 1747)
• June 7 – William Warburton, English writer, critic and cleric (born 1698)
• June 10 – William Kenrick, English novelist, playwright and satirist (born c. 1725)
• July 10 – Jane Gomeldon, English essayist and writer of maxims (born c. 1720)^[6]
• July 21 – Caleb Fleming, English minister and pamphleteer (born 1698)^[7]
• November 16 – Pehr Kalm, Swedish/Finnish botanist, naturalist and travel writer (born 1716)
• December 22 – István Küzmics (Števan Küzmič), Hungarian writer in Prekmurje Slovene (Wendish) (born c. 1723)