1877 in literature

Events

• January 24 – Émile Zola's L'Assommoir, seventh in his novel sequence Les Rougon-Macquart, is first published in book format a few weeks after its serialisation ends in Le Bien public. It sells more than 50,000 copies by the end of the year.
• February 24–March 17 – Robert Louis Stevenson's first published work of fiction, the novella "An Old Song", appears anonymously in four episodes in the magazine London. It is first attributed to Stevenson in 1980.
• July – The ending of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is published in Russkiy vestnik.
• July 15 – "Coppino Law" in Italy makes elementary schools mandatory, free and secular.
• October – Robert Louis Stevenson publishes the short story "A Lodging for the Night", later collected in New Arabian Nights.
• October 15 – Edward L. Wheeler's first story featuring Deadwood Dick, set on the American frontier, opens the first number of Beadle's Half-Dime Library, published in New York.
• November 5 – The Mitchell Library is established in Glasgow.
• November 14 – Henrik Ibsen's first contemporary realist drama The Pillars of Society is premièred at the Odense Teater.
• November 24 – Anna Sewell's novel Black Beauty, his grooms and companions: the autobiography of a horse "translated from the equine" is published by Jarrolds of Norwich in England. Her only book, published five months before her death arising from long-standing illness, it rapidly establishes its position as an all-time bestseller, going on to sell fifty million copies and becoming the sixth best seller in the English language.
• December 30 – Swedish dramatist August Strindberg marries his mistress, the divorced actress Siri von Essen, a member of the Finnish-Swedish minor nobility.

New books

Fiction

• R. M. Ballantyne – The Settler and the Savage
• R. D. Blackmore – Erema; or, my father's sin
• Ned Buntline – Buffalo Bill Trails the Devil Head
• Bankim Chatterjee
• *Chandrasekhar
• *Rajani
• Ion Creangă – Harap Alb
• Fyodor Dostoevsky – "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man"
• Maria Fetherstonhaugh – Kilcorran
• Gustave Flaubert – Three Tales
• Henry James – The American
• Jan Neruda – Povídky malostranské
• Margaret Oliphant – Carità
• William Clark Russell – The Wreck of the Grosvenor
• Theodor Storm – Aquis Submersus
• Anthony Trollope
• *The American Senator
• *Is He Popenjoy?
• Jacint Verdaguer – L'Atlàntida
• Jules Verne
• *Hector Servadac
• *Les Indes noires
• Émile Zola – ''L'Assommoir''

Children and young people

• Louisa May Alcott – Under the Lilacs
• Mary Louisa Molesworth – The Cuckoo Clock
• Anna Sewell – Black Beauty
• Amy Catherine Walton – ''A Peep Behind the Scenes''

Drama

• James Albery – The Pink Dominos
• José Echegaray – Saint or Madman?
• W. S. Gilbert – Engaged
• Henrik Ibsen – The Pillars of Society
• Adolphe L'Arronge – ''Hasemann's Daughters''

Poetry

• Edward Lear – Laughable Lyrics
• Stéphane Mallarmé – ''Poésies''

Non-fiction

• Henry Spencer Ashbee – Index Librorum Prohibitorum: being Notes Bio- Biblio- Icono- graphical and Critical on Curious and Uncommon Books
• Helena Blavatsky – Isis Unveiled
• Florence Caddy – Household Organisation
• Amelia Edwards – A Thousand Miles up the Nile
• Henry Miers Elliot – The History of India, as Told by Its Own Historians
• Kenneth Mackenzie – Royal Masonic Cyclopedia
• Lewis H. Morgan – Ancient Society
• Shen Fu – ''Six Records of a Floating Life''

Births

• January 4 – Sextil Pușcariu, Romanian linguist, philologist and journalist
• February 7 – Alfred Williams, English "hammerman poet"
• March 6 – Rose Fyleman, English writer and poet
• April 14 – Donald Maxwell, English travel writer and illustrator
• April 29 – Henri Stahl, Romanian historian, short story writer, memoirist and stenographer
• June 11 – Renée Vivien, born Pauline Mary Tarn, English-born French-language Symbolist poet
• July 2 – Hermann Hesse, German-Swiss poet, novelist and painter
• August 27 – Lloyd C. Douglas, American novelist and pastor
• September 1 – Rex Beach, American novelist and playwright
• September 9 – James Agate, English diarist and critic
• November 15 – William Hope Hodgson, English fiction writer

Deaths

• January 29 – Caroline Howard Jervey, American author, poet, and teacher
• February 18 – Henrietta A. Bingham, American writer and editor
• April – Ernst Moritz Ludwig Ettmüller, German philologist
• June 15 – Caroline Norton, English poet, pamphleteer and social reformer
• June 17 – John Stevens Cabot Abbott, American historian and pastor
• August 30 – Toru Dutt, multilingual Indian Bengali poet, novelist and translator, of pulmonary tuberculosis
• September 12 – Emily Pepys, English child diarist
• October 10 – Johann Georg Baiter, Swiss philologist and critic
• October 16 – Théodore Barrière, French dramatist
• October 28 – Julia Kavanagh, Irish novelist
• December 12 – José de Alencar, Brazilian novelist