This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1745.

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• February – London theatres stage competing productions of Shakespeare's King John in response to the Jacobite rising begun this summer by Bonnie Prince Charlie. David Garrick's production of the original text at Drury Lane contrasts with Colley Cibber's adaptation Papal Tyranny in the Reign of King John at Covent Garden. The rivalry anticipates "the Romeo and Juliet war" of five years later.^[1]
• September 21 – Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock delivers a speech on epic poetry – Abschiedsrede über die epische Poesie, kultur- und literargeschichtlich erläutert – to mark his leaving school.
• October 19 – Jonathan Swift, Irish satirist and Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, dies aged 78. His body is laid out in public for the people of Dublin to pay their last respects, and he is buried, in accordance with his wishes, in his cathedral by Esther Johnson's side, with his own epitaph: Ubi sæva Indignatio/Ulterius/Cor lacerare nequit ("Where savage indignation can no longer lacerate the heart").^[2]
• November 17 – In Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Bishop August Gottlieb Spangenberg of the Moravian Church asks innkeeper Samuel Powell to begin importing and distributing books, the origins of a bookstore still in existence in 2007.^[3]

• January 4 – Johann Jakob Griesbach, German Biblical commentator (died 1812)
• February 2
  • Hannah More, English Romantic poet, religious writer and philanthropist (died 1833)
  • John Nichols, English printer and antiquary (died 1826)
• February 20 – Henry James Pye, English poet (died 1813)
• July 26 – Henry Mackenzie, Scottish novelist, writer and poet (died 1831)
• September 3 – Charles Victor de Bonstetten, Swiss liberal writer (died 1832)
• September 12 (bapt.) – Karl von Marinelli, Austrian actor and dramatist (died 1803)
• October 13 (bapt.) – William Crowe, English poet (died 1829)
• December 10 – Thomas Holcroft, English dramatist and miscellanist (died 1809)
• Probable year of birth – Olaudah Equiano, African writer (died 1797)

• Spring – William Meston, Scottish poet (born c. 1688)^[4]
• May 13 – Charles Coffey, Irish dramatist and composer^[5]
• July 11 – Pierre Desmaiseaux, exiled French biographer (born c. 1673)
• September 6 – David Wilkins, Prussian-born English orientalist (born 1685)
• October 19 – Jonathan Swift, Irish satirist (born 1667)
• November 16 – William Broome, English poet and translator (born 1689)
• December 16 – Pierre Desfontaines, French journalist and historian (born 1685)
• December 29 – Nur al-Din Nimatullah al-Jazayiri, Safavid Iranian Ja'fari jurist, linguist and writer (born 1677) ^[6]

• Walter Scott's novel Waverley (1814) and Robert Louis Stevenson's The Master of Ballantrae (1889) are set during the Jacobite rising of 1745.