1813 in literature

• January 23 – Remorse, a new play by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, begins a three-week run at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London.[1]
• January 27 – Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice is first published in London (as "by the author of Sense and Sensibility"). A second edition follows in November.[2]
• February 3 – Leigh Hunt is imprisoned for libeling the Prince Regent in The Examiner (1812). He continues writing in prison and will be visited there by Lord Byron, Thomas Moore, Charles and Mary Lamb, Charles Cowden Clarke, Maria Edgeworth, William Hazlitt, Jeremy Bentham, Lord Brougham and Benjamin Haydon.[3]
• May 10 – The eccentric English amateur actor Robert Coates makes his London debut in his favourite role, Romeo, at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket.
• June 17–18 – The German poet and playwright Theodor Körner, fighting with the Königlich Preußisches Freikorps von Lützow in the German campaign against Napoleon (War of the Sixth Coalition), composes the sonnet "Abschied vom Leben" (Farewell to Life) while lying severely wounded.
• August 25 – Theodor Körner composes the patriotic lyric "Schwertlied" (Sword Song) on the night before his death in action, aged 21.[4]
• October 2 – The Philomathean Society of the University of Pennsylvania is founded. It is the oldest continuously existing literary society in the United States.[5]
• Autumn – Robert Southey becomes Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom after Walter Scott declines the post.[6]
• The first award of the Chancellor's Gold Medal for poetry at the University of Cambridge in England goes to George Waddington for "Columbus".
• The historian and publicist Joseph François Michaud takes up Seat 29 of the Académie française.[7]

Uncertain date

• George E. Clymer invents the Columbian press.

• January 23
  • Camilla Collett, Norwegian writer (died 1895)
  • Charles Harpur, Australian poet (died 1868)
• February 11 - Otto Ludwig, German novelist and playwright (died 1865)
• March 11 – William Watkiss Lloyd, English polymath (died 1863)
• March 18 – Christian Friedrich Hebbel, German poet and dramatist (died 1863)
• May 5 – Søren Kierkegaard, Danish philosopher (died 1855)
• May 20 – William Smith, English lexicographer (died 1893)
• October 17 – Georg Büchner, German dramatist, poet and writer (died 1837)

Uncertain dates

• Harriet Jacobs, African-American memoirist and abolitionist (died 1897)
• Liu Xizai (刘熙载), Chinese scholar and literary critic (died 1881)

• January 1 – Gioacchino Navarro, Maltese priest and poet (born 1748)
• January 20 – Christoph Martin Wieland, German poet (born 1733)
• February 4 – James Whitelaw, Irish historian (born 1749)
• April 22 – Henry Clifford, English legal writer (born 1768)
• June 26 – Jean-François Cailhava de L'Estandoux, French dramatist, poet and critic (born 1731)
• August 10 – Mary Anne Burges, Scottish religious allegorist (born 1763)
• August 11 – Henry James Pye, English Poet Laureate (born 1745)
• August 26 – Theodor Körner, German poet and dramatist (killed in action, born 1791)[8]
• October 11 – Robert Kerr, Scottish science writer and translator (born 1755)
• November 12 – J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, French-American writer (born 1735)