See also: 1757 in literature, other events of 1758, 1759 in literature, list of years in literature.

Events

• Voltaire buys estate at Ferney.
• Annual Register founded by Edmund Burke and Robert Dodsley.
• Jean-François Marmontel enters the service of Madame de Pompadour.
• Samuel Johnson begins his essay series, The Idler.
• Anna Laetitia Barbauld and her family move to Warrington in Cheshire.
• Pierre Louis Maupertuis moves to his final home at Basel, Switzerland.
• Samuel Johnson launches a new periodical, The Idler.

New books

• John Armstrong as "Launcelot Temple" - Sketches
• Charlotte Lennox - Henrietta
• Horace Walpole
  • A Dialogue Between Two Great Ladies
  • Fugitive Pieces

New drama

• John Cleland - Tombo-Chiqui, or, The American Savage (not produced)
• Denis Diderot - Le père de famille
• Robert Dodsley - Cleone
• David Garrick - Florizel and Perdita
• John Home - Aegis
• Charlotte Lennox - Philander
• Arthur Murphy - The Upholsterer
• George Alexander Stevens - Albion Restored

Poetry

• Mark Akenside - An Ode to the Country Gentlemen
• John Gilbert Cooper - The Call of Aristippus
• Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim - Preussische Kriegslieder von einem Grenadier
• James Macpherson - The Highlander
• Thomas Parnell - Posthumous Works

Non-fiction

• William Blackstone - A Discourse on the Study of Law
• John Brown - An Explanatory Defence of the Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (see 1757)
• Elizabeth Carter ed. - All the Works of Epicetus
• Benjamin Franklin - Father Abraham's Sermon
• Oliver Goldsmith as "James Willington" - The Memoirs of a Protestant
• William Hawkins - Tracts in Divinity
• Claude Adrien Helvétius - De l'Esprit
• Henry Home - Historical Law-Tracts
• Robert Lowth - The Life of William of Wykeham
• Antoine Simon Le Page Du Pratz - Histoire de la Louisiane (History of Louisiana)
• Richard Price - A Review of the Principal Questions and Difficulties in Morals
• Jonathan Swift - The History of the Last Four Years of the Queen
• Horace Walpole - A Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors of England
• Arthur Young - The Theatre of the Present War in North America

Births

• October 16 - Noah Webster (died 1843)
• December 9 - Richard Colt Hoare (died 1838)

Deaths

• January 7 - Allan Ramsay, poet (born 1686)
• March 22 - Jonathan Edwards, theologian (born 1703)
• December 25 - James Hervey, religious writer (born 1714)
• date unknown - Theophilus Cibber, dramatist and actor, son of Colley Cibber (born 1703)