The year 1860 in literature involved some significant new books.

Events

• January - First issue of the Cornhill Magazine
• June 9 - Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter becomes the first dime novel to be published.
• Fyodor Dostoevsky returns to St Petersburg.
• Mary Elizabeth Braddon meets her future husband John Maxwell.
• Alexander Bain is appointed to the chair of logic and English literature at the University of Aberdeen.
• The Univers religieux is suppressed by the French government.
• Samuel Wilberforce and Thomas Huxley debate the theories of Charles Darwin at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
• The first Vanity Fair magazine is published in the USA.

New books

• R M Ballantyne -The Dog Crusoe
• Wilkie Collins - The Woman in White
• George Eliot - The Mill on the Floss
• Edmond & Jules de Goncourt - Charles Demailly
• Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Marble Faun
• Mor Jokai - Poor Rich
• George Meredith - Evan Harrington
• Multatuli - Max Havelaar
• R. M. Potter - The Fall of the Alamo
• Charles Reade - The Cloister and the Hearth
• Charlotte Mary Yonge
• Hopes and Fears
• Kenneth

Drama

• Dion Boucicault - The Colleen Bawn

Poetry

• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - "Paul Revere's Ride"

Non-fiction

• Eugène Crepet - Poètes francais; Les Paradis artificiels: opium et haschisch
• Ralph Waldo Emerson - The Conduct of Life
• Gray's Anatomy, 2nd edition
• John Ruskin - Modern Painters IV

Births

• January 10 - Charles G.D. Roberts, poet (+ 1943)
• January 29 - Anton Chekhov (+ 1904)
• February 11 - Rachilde (Marguerite Vallette-Eymery), French author (+ 1953)
• May 9 - J. M. Barrie, novelist and dramatist (+ 1937)
• June 6 - William Ralph Inge, theologian
• July 3 - Charlotte Perkins Gilman, novelist and short story writer (+ 1935)
• September 13 - Ralph Connor, Canadian novelist (+ 1937)
• September 14 - Hamlin Garland (+ 1940)
• October 23 - Molly Elliot Seawell (+ 1916)
• December 11 - Leonard Huxley, writer and editor, father of Aldous Huxley
• date unknown - Harriet Theresa Comstock, children's author

Deaths

• January 29 - Ernst Moritz Arndt, poet
• February 9 - William Evans Burton, dramatist
• February 25 - Chauncey Allen Goodrich, lexicographer
• May 9 - Samuel Griswold Goodrich, children's author (Peter Parley)
• May 16 - Annabella Byron, 11th Baroness Wentworth, wife of Lord Byron
• May 23 - Albert Richard Smith, journalist and humorist
• August 25
• Christian Lobeck, classical scholar
• Johan Ludvig Heiberg, poet
• September 21 - Arthur Schopenhauer, philosopher
• December 2 - Ferdinand Christian Baur, theologian

Awards