1839 in literature
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The year 1839 in literature involved some significant new books.

Events

• Washington Irving begins contributing regularly to Knickerbocker magazine, and will publish thirty new pieces in the magazine — including "The Creole Village," in which he will coin the phrase "the almighty dollar" — through March 1841.
• John Roberton's pseudo-medical work On Diseases of the Generative System (1811) is declared to be indecent and becomes the centre of the important British constitutional case of Stockdale v. Hansard.

New books

• William Harrison Ainsworth - Jack Sheppard
• Charles Dickens - Nicholas Nickleby
• Frederick Marryat
  • Diary in America
  • The Phantom Ship
• Harriet Martineau - Deerbrook
• Edgar Allan Poe - The Fall of the House of Usher
• Jules Sandeau - Marianna
• Stendhal - The Charterhouse of Parma
• Philip Meadows Taylor - Confessions of a Thug

New drama

• Felicia Hemans - De Chatillon

Poetry

• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow -Hyperion; Voices of the Night

Non-fiction

• Louis Blanc — L'Organisation du Travail
• Charles Darwin - The Voyage of the Beagle
• George W. M. Reynolds - Grace Darling; or, the Heroine of the Ferne Islands
• Jared Sparks — Life of Washington
• John Tallis — Tallis Directory

Births

• January 7 - Ouida, novelist (+ 1908)
• February 1 - James Herne, dramatist (+ 1901)
• February 22 - Francis Pharcellus Church, American editor and publisher (+ 1906)
• April 18 - Henry Kendall, Australian poet (+ 1882)
• June 21 - Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Brazilian poet and novelist (+ 1909)
• August 4 - Walter Horatio Pater, English writer (+ 1894)
• August 9 - Gaston Paris, philologist (+ 1903)
• August 25 - Bret Harte (+ 1902)
• September 10 - Charles Peirce, philosopher (+ 1914)
• November 29 - Ludwig Anzengruber, dramatist (+ 1889)

Deaths

• April 11 - John Galt, novelist
• May 17 - Archibald Alison (Scottish author)
• May 21 - José María Heredia y Campuzano, Cuban poet
• September 4 - Hermann Olshausen, theologian

Awards

• Newdigate prize - John Ruskin