The year 1864 in literature involved some significant new books.

Events

• Ambrose Bierce is wounded at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain.
• Charles Baudelaire leaves Paris for Belgium in the hope of resolving his financial difficulties.
• Henrik Ibsen leaves Norway for Italy in a self-imposed exile that will last for 27 years.
• A debate at the Royal Geographical Society between Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke fails to take place, owing to Speke's suicide (or accidental shooting).
• Alexandre Dumas, fils marries Nadejda Naryschkine. His father, Alexandre Dumas, père, returns to Paris from Italy.
• John Addington Symonds the younger marries Janet Catherine North.
• James Payn publishes his most popular story, Lost Sir Massingberd, in Chambers's Journal.

New books

• José de Alencar - Diva
• Jules Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly -Chevalier Destouches
• R. D. Blackmore - Clara Vaughan
• Mary Elizabeth Braddon - Henry Dunbar: the Story of an Outcast
• Fyodor Dostoevsky - Notes from Underground
• George Eliot - Brother Jacob
• Elizabeth Gaskell - Wives and Daughters
• Edmond de Goncourt & Jules de Goncourt -Renée Mauperin
• Sheridan Le Fanu
• Uncle Silas
• The Wylder's Hand
• George MacDonald - The Light Princess
• Anthony Trollope - The Small House at Allington
• Jules Verne - Journey to the Center of the Earth

New drama

• Thomas William Robertson - David Garrick

Poetry

• Robert Browning - Dramatis Personae
• Alfred Tennyson - Enoch Arden
• Alfred de Vigny - Les Destinées (posthumously published)

Non-fiction

• American Dictionary of the English Language (Webster's), revised edition
• George Perkins Marsh - Man and Nature
• Narrative of the Life of J. D. Green, a Runaway Slave from Kentucky
• John Henry Cardinal Newman - Apologia Pro Vita Sua
• John Ruskin - Cestus of Aglaia

Births

• January 24 - Marguerite Durand, French actress, journalist, and feminist leader (d. 1936)
• February 14 - Israel Zangwill, novelist and playwright, (d. 1926)
• April 21 - Max Weber, sociologist
• July 20 - Erik Axel Karlfeldt, Swedish writer, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1931)
• October 14 - Stefan Żeromski, novelist, poet and dramatist
• November 11 - Alfred Hermann Fried, pacifist writer, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (d. 1921)
• December 12 - Paul Elmer More, critic and essayist (d. 1937)

Deaths

• January 29 - Lucy Aikin, historian
• February 2 - Adelaide Anne Procter, poet
• March 16 - Robert Smith Surtees, novelist and sports writer
• May 19 - Nathaniel Hawthorne, novelist
• May 20 - John Clare, poet
• May 26 - Charles Sealsfield, novelist
• July 4 - Thomas Colley Grattan, novelist
• August 7 - Janez Puhar, poet
• September - Antônio Gonçalves Dias, poet (lost at sea)
• September 17 - Walter Savage Landor, poet
• date unknown - Anton Felix Schindler, biographer of Beethoven

Awards