1820 in literature
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The year 1820 in literature involved some significant events.

Events

• Robert Chambers's publishing company publishes The Songs of Robert Burns.
• November 20 - An 80-ton sperm whale attacks the Essex (a whaling ship from Nantucket, Massachusetts) 2,000 miles from the western coast of South America (Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick was in part inspired by this story).

New books

• James Fenimore Cooper - Precaution
• Thomas Gaspey - Forty Years Ago
• Robert Huish - Castle of Nielo
• Francis Lathom - Italian Mysteries
• Charles Maturin - Melmoth the Wanderer
• Regina Marie Roche - The Munster Cottage Boy
• Sir Walter Scott
  • The Abbot
  • The Monastery
• Louisa Stanhope - The Crusaders
• Rosalia St. Clair - The Highland Castle, and the Lowland Cottage
• Sarah Wilkinson - The Spectre of Lanmere Abbey

New drama

• William Thomas Moncrieff - The Lear of Private Life
• Percy Bysshe Shelley - Prometheus Unbound

Poetry

• Robert Burns - The Songs of Robert Burns
• John Clare - Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery
• John Keats - The Eve of St. Agnes; Lamia and Other Poems
• Alphonse de Lamartine - Méditations poétiques
• Aleksandr Pushkin - Ruslan and Ludmila

Non-fiction

• Thomas Brown - Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel - Elements of the Philosophy of Right
• John George Hoffman - Pow-Wows; or, Long Lost Friend
• Charles Lamb - Essays of Elia
• Thomas Malthus - Principles of Political Economy
• Charles Mills -History of the Crusades for the Recovery and Possession of the Holy Land
• Robert Southey - Life of Wesley

Births

• January 17 - Anne Brontë, author (+ 1849)
• March 30 - Anna Sewell, author (+ 1878)
• April 26 - Alice Cary, American poet and short-story writer
• November 28 - Friedrich Engels, socialist writer (+ 1895)

Deaths

• November 12 - William Hayley, biographer of William Cowper

Awards