1821 in literature

This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1821.

Events

May – Percy Bysshe Shelley's Queen Mab: a philosophical poem is distributed by a pirate publisher in London, leading to prosecution by the Society for the Prevention of Vice.
August 4 – Atkinson & Alexander publish The Saturday Evening Post for the first time as a weekly newspaper in the United States.
unknown dates
*James Ballantyne begins publishing his Novelist's Library in Edinburgh edited by Sir Walter Scott.
*In the first known obscenity case in the United States, a Massachusetts court outlaws the John Cleland novel Fanny Hill. The publisher, Peter Holmes, is convicted of printing a "lewd and obscene" novel.
*Sunthorn Phu is imprisoned and begins his epic poem Phra Aphai Mani.

James Burney – An Essay, by Way of Lecture, on the Game of Whist
Owen Chase – Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex
William Cobbett – The American Gardener
George Grote – Statement of the Question of Parliamentary Reform
William Hazlitt – Table-Talk
James Mill – Elements of Political Economy
Robert Owen – Report to the County of Lanark, of a plan for relieving public distress and removing discontent
Thomas De Quincey – Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
John Roberton – Kalogynomia, or the Laws of Female Beauty
Robert Southey – ''Life of Cromwell''

January 7 – Anne Hunter, Scottish poet and salonnière
January 14 – Jens Zetlitz, Norwegian poet
February 23 – John Keats, English poet
February 26 – Joseph de Maistre, Savoyard philosopher
March 17 – Louis-Marcelin de Fontanes, French poet
April 14 – Susan Carnegie, writer and founder of the first public asylum in Scotland
April 16 – Thomas Scott, English cleric and religious writer
May 2 – Hester Thrale, English diarist and arts patron
May 21 – John Jones (Jac Glan-y-gors), Welsh poet and satirist
May 22 – Johann Georg Heinrich Feder, German philosopher
June 15 – John Ballantyne, publisher
August 1 – Elizabeth Inchbald, English novelist and dramatist
August 24 – John William Polidori, English physician, writer
November 17 – James Burney, English rear-admiral and naval writer
November – Richard Fenton, poet and author