1862 in literature

• February – Ivan Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons (Отцы и дети – old spelling Отцы и дѣти, Ottsy i dety, literally "Fathers and Children") is published by Russkiy Vestnik in Moscow.
• March 30 or 31 – The first two volumes of Victor Hugo's epic historical novel Les Misérables appear in Brussels, followed on April 3 by Paris publication, with the remaining volumes on May 15. The first English-language translations, by Charles Edwin Wilbour, are published in New York on June 7, and by Frederic Charles Lascelles Wraxall, in London in October.
• April 6 – Two months after joining the staff of General William Babcock Hazen, Ambrose Bierce joins in the Battle of Shiloh, later the subject of a memoir.^[1] Among those on the opposite side is the future journalist and explorer Henry Morton Stanley, who will also record his experiences.^[2]
• April 28 – Thomas Hardy becomes an assistant to architect Arthur Blomfield.^[3]
• June – Nikolai Chernyshevsky is imprisoned in Saint Petersburg and begins his novel What Is To Be Done?^[4]
• June 4 – Henry Morton Stanley, now a "Galvanized Yankee", joins the Union Army; he is discharged 18 days later because of illness.^[5]
• July – George Eliot's historical novel Romola begins serialization in Cornhill Magazine, the first time she has published a full-length book in this format. George Murray Smith of the publishers Smith, Elder & Co. has agreed a £7,000 advance for it.^[6]
• July 1 – Moscow's first free public library opens as The Library of the Moscow Public Museum and Rumiantsev Museum, predecessor of the Russian State Library.
• July 4 – Charles Dodgson (better known as by his later pseudonym Lewis Carroll) extemporises a story for 10-year-old Alice Liddell and her sisters on a rowing trip on The Isis from Oxford to Godstow. The story becomes a manuscript titled Alice's Adventures Under Ground and is published in 1865 as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.^[7]

• September 23 – Leo Tolstoy marries Sophia (Sonya) Andreevna Behrs, 16 years his junior, in Moscow, having given her a diary detailing his previous sexual relations.
• November 26 – Charles Dodgson sends the handwritten manuscript of Alice's Adventures Underground to Alice Liddell.^[8]
• November 29 – Serialization of The Notting Hill Mystery by "Charles Felix" (probably Charles Warren Adams) commences in Once A Week (London), with illustrations by George du Maurier; it is seen as the first full-length detective novel in English.^[9][10]
• December – Louisa May Alcott becomes a nurse at the Union hospital in Georgetown
• December 24 – William Dean Howells marries Elinor Mead at the American Embassy in Paris.

Uncertain dates

• James Russell Lowell begins writing for The North American Review.
• Karl Heinrich Ulrichs begins writing about homosexuality under the pseudonym of "Numa Numantius".

• January 24 – Edith Wharton, American novelist (died 1937)^[11]
• February 17 – Mori Ōgai (森 鷗外), Japanese army surgeon, poet, translator and realist fiction writer (died 1922)
• April 11 – Lurana W. Sheldon, American author and newspaper editor (died 1945)^{[citation needed]}
• May 1 – Marcel Prévost, French dramatist (died 1941)
• May 9 – Hugh Stowell Scott (Henry Seton Merriman), English novelist (died 1903)
• May 15 – Arthur Schnitzler, Austrian dramatist and novelist (died 1931)
• June 6 – Henry Newbolt, English poet (died 1938)
• June 18 – Carolyn Wells, American novelist and poet (died 1942)^[12]
• July 16 – Ida B. Wells, American journalist and novelist (died 1931)^[13]
• August 1 – Montague Rhodes James, English scholar and short story writer (died 1936)
• August 2 – Paul Bujor, Romanian politician, zoologist and short story writer (died 1952)
• August 6 – Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, English historian (died 1932)^[14]
• August 21 – Emilio Salgari, Italian adventure novelist (died 1911)^[15]
• August 29 – Maurice Maeterlinck, Belgian poet and playwright (died 1949)^[16]
• September 2 – Okakura Kakuzō (岡倉 覚三), Japanese writer on the arts (died 1913)
• September 27 – Francis Adams, Anglo-Australian poet, novelist and dramatist (died 1893)
• October 13 – Mary Kingsley, English travel writer (died 1900)^[17]
• November 15 – Gerhart Hauptmann, German dramatist, novelist and poet, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (died 1946)
• December 8 – Georges Feydeau, French farceur (died 1921)
• December 16 – John Fox, Jr., American novelist and journalist (died 1919)
• December 23 – Henri Pirenne, Belgian historian (died 1935)
• date unknown — Jessie King, Scottish essayist, poet, journalist (year of death unknown)

• January 11 – Jean Philibert Damiron, French philosopher (born 1794)
• February 24 – Bernhard Severin Ingemann, Danish novelist and poet (born 1789)
• February 27 (February 16 O.S.) – Constantin Sion, Moldavian polemicist, genealogist and literary forger (born 1795)
• April 6 – Fitz James O'Brien, Irish-American science fiction pioneer (born 1828)
• May 6 – Henry David Thoreau, American philosopher (born 1817)
• May 25 – Johann Nestroy, Austrian dramatist (born 1801)
• August 27 – Thomas Jefferson Hogg, English biographer (born 1792)
• November 26 – Julia Pardoe, English novelist and historian (born 1806)
• November 30 – James Sheridan Knowles, Irish dramatist and actor (born 1784)
• December 17 – Katherine Thomson, writing as Grace Wharton, English novelist and historian (born 1797)^[18]

• Gaisford Prize – Robert William Raper (Trinity) for comic iambic verse: Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part II, Act 4, Sc. 3^[19]
• Newdigate Prize – Arthur C. Auchmuty, "Julian the Apostate"