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The year 1850 in literature involved some significant new books.

Events

• Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) named Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, succeeding William Wordsworth.
• Periodical Household Words begins publication
• Henrik Ibsen's second play, The Burial Mound, is produced

New books

• Wilkie Collins - Antonina
• Charles Dickens - David Copperfield
• Alexandre Dumas, fils - Tristan le Roux
• Alexandre Dumas, père - The Black Tulip
• Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Scarlet Letter
• Caroline Lee Hentz
  • Linda
  • Rena, the Snowbird
• Herman Melville - White-Jacket
• Catharine Maria Sedgwick - Tales of City Life
• Frank Smedley - Frank Fairleigh
• Anthony Trollope - La Vendée
• Susan Warner - The Wide, Wide World

New drama

• Christian Friedrich Hebbel - Herodes and Mariamne
• Henrik Ibsen - Catilina (Ibsen's first play, not performed until 1881)
• Otto Ludwig - Der Erbförster
• Ivan Turgenev - A Month in the Country

Poetry

• Elizabeth Barrett Browning - Sonnets from the Portuguese

Non-fiction

• Ivar Aasen - Dictionary of the Norwegian Dialects
• Ralph Waldo Emerson - Representative Men
• Friedrich Engels - The Peasant War in Germany
• Alexander Herzen - From Another Shore
• Washington Irving - Mahomet and His Successors

Births

• January 14 - Pierre Loti, novelist
• January 15 - Mihai Eminescu, poet
• June 27 - Lafcadio Hearn, writer
• June 27 - Ivan Vazov, poet, novelist and playwright
• August 5 - Guy de Maupassant, writer
• September 2 - Eugene Field, poet and essayist
• November 5 - Ella Wheeler Wilcox, poet and journalist
• November 13 - Robert Louis Stevenson, novelist

Deaths

• January 20 - Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger, poet and dramatist
• April 7 - William Lisle Bowles, poet and critic
• April 23 - William Wordsworth, poet
• May 31 - Giuseppe Giusti, poet
• July 14 - August Neander, theologian
• July 19 - Sarah Margaret Fuller, writer
• August 18 - Honoré de Balzac, novelist
• August 22 - Nikolaus Lenau, poet
• November 4 - Gustav Schwab, author
• December 24 - Frédéric Bastiat, philosopher and author

Awards