See also: 1777 in literature, other events of 1778, 1779 in literature, list of years in literature.

Events

• Novelist Sarah Scott gives up writing on receipt of her father's legacy.

New books

• Fanny Burney - Evelina
• Pierre-Louis Ginguené - Satire des Satires
• Clara Reeve - The Old English Baron

New drama

• Henry Brooke - collected plays
• Elizabeth Craven - The Sleep Walker
• Charles Dibdin - Poor Vulcan
• Samuel Foote
• The Devil upon Two Sticks
• The Nabob
• The Taylors
• John Home - Alfred
• Hannah More - Percy

Poetry

• John Codrington Bampfylde - Sixteen Sonnets
• Thomas Chatterton - Miscellanies
• William Combe - The Auction
• George Ellis as "Sir Gregory Gander" - Poetical Tales
• William Hayley - A Poetical Epistle to an Eminent Painter
• John Scott - Moral Eclogues
• John Wolcot as "Peter Pindar" - A Poetical, Supplicating, Modest and Affecting Epistle to those Literary Colossuses the Reviewers

Non-fiction

• Anna Barbauld - Lessons for Children
• Edmund Burke - Two Letters on the Trade of Ireland
• Vicesimus Knox - Essays Moral and Literary
• Ann Murry - Mentoria
• Thomas Pennant - A Tour in Wales
• Gilbert Stuart - A View of Society in Europe

Births

• January 26 - Ugo Foscolo, Italian poet
• April 10 - William Hazlitt
• September 8 - Clemens Brentano
• November 1 - Mary Brunton, novelist

Deaths

• May 30 - Voltaire, philosopher
• July 3 - Jean-Jacques Rousseau, philosopher
• November 11 - Anne Steele, poet and hymn-writer
• date unknown - James Townley, dramatist
• Thomas Arne, musician
• William Pitt the Elder, politician