US author Lew Wallace publishes a historical novel, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

In Washington Square Henry James tells the sad story of heiress Catherine Sloper

Joel Chandler Harris publishes Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, the first of many Uncle Remus volumes

Henry James's novel The Portrait of a Lady studies an American girl, Isabel Archer, in the unfamiliar context of Europe

Mark Twain's autobiographical book Life on the Mississippi details his own personal involvement with the great river

Huck Finn and his friend Tom Sawyer continue their exploits on the Mississippi in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

In his novel The Rise of Silas Lapham US author William Dean Howells follows the fortunes of a self-made man in Boston

US author Frances Hodgson Burnett publishes Little Lord Fauntleroy, featuring an aristocratic child in a velvet suit

Poems is the first of six collections of Emily Dickinson's poetry, found among her papers on her death and published posthumously

Herman Melville dies in obscurity in New York, with an unpublished manuscript of Billy Budd (not printed till 1924)

Leaves of Grass, still growing, is published in its ninth edition in the year of Walt Whitman's death

US author Stephen Crane cannot find a publisher for his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, so issues it privately

Stephen Crane succeeds handsomely with his second novel, The Red Badge of Courage, set in the American Civil War

The prolific US poet Edwin Arlington Robinson publishes The Torrent and the Night Before, his first poems about the fictional Tilbury Town

Henry James views the feckless adults in Maisie's life through the eyes of the child herself in What Maisie Knew

Charlotte Perkins Gilman publishes Women and Economics, developing the feminist theme in US cultural and political life

US social scientist Thorstein Veblen publishes The Theory of the Leisure Class, an attack on capitalist exploitation and 'consumerism'

Frank Baum introduces children to Oz, in his book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

After a prodigiously productive career as novelist and journalist, Stephen Crane dies of tuberculosis at the age of 28

Joshua Slocum publishes Sailing Alone Around the World, an account of his famous 1895-8 circumnavigation

Jack London's first collection of stories, The Son of the Wolf, brings him a wide readership

Theodore Dreiser's first novel, Sister Carrie, receives no publicity because his publisher, Frank Doubleday, considers it immoral

The Voice of the People is the first of Ellen Glasgow's novels set in her native state, Virginia

Frank Norris publishes The Octopus, the first of a projected trilogy of novels set in Southern California

Edith Wharton's publishes her first full-length novel, The Valley of Decision