1880 in literature

Events

April – Publication in France of Les Soirées de Médan, a collection of six Naturalist short stories set during the Franco-Prussian War by six authors who frequent Émile Zola's home, including Guy de Maupassant's first, Boule de Suif, which launches his career.

October – Henry James's novel The Portrait of a Lady begins serial publication in Macmillan's Magazine (U.K.) and The Atlantic Monthly (U.S.)

December 15 – First performance of a play by Henrik Ibsen in English, The Pillars of Society (under the title Quicksands) at the Gaiety Theatre, London.

Karl May begins publishing his Orient Cycle in Deutschen Hausschatz, where he also publishes Deadly Dust: Ein Abenteuer aus dem nordamerikanischen Westen.

In the United States, the publishing business of Henry Oscar Houghton and George H. Mifflin is reconstructed as Houghton, Mifflin and Company.

Fiction

Henry Adams (anonymously) – Democracy: An American Novel

Rhoda Broughton – Second Thoughts

Wilkie Collins – Jezebel's Daughter

Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield – Endymion

Fyodor Dostoevsky – The Brothers Karamazov (Братья Карамазовы, Brat'ya Karamazovy)

Amelia Edwards – Lord Brackenbury

Evelyn Everett-Green – Tom Tempest's Victory

Theodor Fontane

Grete Minde

Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg

George Gissing – Workers in the Dawn

Walter T. Gray (Metta Victoria Fuller Victor) – A Bad Boy's Diary

Percy Greg – Across the Zodiac

Anna Katharine Green – A Strange Disappearance

Thomas Hardy – The Trumpet-Major

Henry Kendall – Songs from the Mountains

Alexander Kielland – Garman og Worse

Pierre Loti – Le Mariage de Loti (as Rarahu)

Ouida – Moths

Louisa Parr – Adam and Eve

Anthony Trollope – Ayala's Angel

Mark Twain – A Tramp Abroad

Giovanni Verga – Vita dei campi (The Life of the Fields, short stories, including "Cavalleria rusticana" ("Rustic chivalry"))

Lew Wallace – Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

Émile Zola – Nana

Children and young people

Carlo Collodi – The Adventures of Pinocchio (Le avventure di Pinocchio)

Evelyn Everett-Green – Tom Tempest's Victory

Johanna Spyri – Heidi

Jules Verne – The Steam House (La Maison à vapeur)

Drama

Oscar Wilde – Vera; or, The Nihilists (privately printed)

Adolphe L'Arronge – The Lonei Household

Non-fiction

Algernon Charles Swinburne – A Study of Shakespeare

Births

February 21 – Waldemar Bonsels, German writer (died 1952)

February 27 – Angelina Weld Grimké, African-American playwright and poet (died 1958)

March 13 – Frank Thiess, German writer (died 1977)

March 21 – E. H. Young, English novelist (died 1949)

March 30 – Seán O'Casey, Irish dramatist (died 1964)

June 10 – Margit Kaffka, Hungarian novelist, short story writer and poet (died 1918)

June 17 – Carl Van Vechten, American writer (died 1964)

July 4 – Anne Beffort, Luxembourg literary writer and biographer (died 1966)

July 10 – Greye La Spina, American writer (died 1969)

September 12 – H. L. Mencken, American journalist and English language scholar (died 1956)

October 18 – Ze'ev Jabotinsky, Russian-born Zionist leader, novelist and poet (died 1940)

November 1 – Grantland Rice, American sports writer (died 1954)

November 6 – Robert Musil, Austrian novelist (died 1942)

November 25 – Elsie J. Oxenham (Elsie Jeanette Dunkerley), English story writer for girls (died 1960)

November 29 – N. D. Cocea, Romanian novelist, critic and journalist (died 1949)

Deaths

February 12 – Karl Eduard von Holtei, German poet and dramatist (born 1798)

February 17 – James Lenox, American bibliophile (born 1800)

April 9 – Louis Edmond Duranty, French novelist and critic (born 1833)

April 16 – Edward Vaughan Hyde Kenealy, Irish writer and barrister (born 1819)

May 6 – Ivan Surikov, Russian poet (born 1841)

May 8 – Gustave Flaubert, French novelist (born 1821)

May 30 – James Planché, English dramatist (born 1796)

June 7 – Karl Christian Planck, German philosopher (born 1819)

July 7 – Lydia Maria Child, American writer and abolitionist (born 1802)

July 12 – Tom Taylor, English dramatist and journalist (born 1817)

September 23 – Geraldine Jewsbury, English novelist and woman of letters (born 1812)

December 22 – George Eliot (Mary Anne Cross), English novelist (born 1819)

Awards

Commander, First Class of the Order of St. Olav – Andreas Munch

In literature

The dramas Gas Light by Patrick Hamilton (1938) and Another Part of the Forest by Lillian Hellman (1946) are set in this year.

Mori Ōgai's novel The Wild Geese (雁, Gan, 1911–13) is set in this year.

Virginia Woolf's novel The Years (1937) opens in this year.