The literary tradition of Birmingham originally grew out of the culture of religious puritanism that developed in the town in the 16th and 17th centuries. Birmingham's location away from established centres of power, its dynamic merchant-based economy, and its weak aristocracy gave it a reputation as a place where loyalty to the established power structures of church and feudal state were weak, and saw it emerge as a haven for free-thinkers and radicals, encouraging the birth of a vibrant culture of writing, printing, and publishing.

The 18th century saw the town's radicalism widen to encompass other literary areas, and while Birmingham's tradition of vigorous literary debate on theological issues was to survive into the Victorian era, the writers of the Midlands Enlightenment brought new thinking to areas as diverse as poetry, philosophy, history, fiction, and children's literature. By the Victorian era Birmingham was one of the largest towns in England and at the forefront of the emergence of modern industrial society, a fact reflected in its role as both a subject and a source for the newly dominant literary form of the novel. The diversification of the city's literary output continued into the 20th century, encompassing writing as varied as the uncompromising modernist fiction of Henry Green, the science fiction of John Wyndham, the popular romance of Barbara Cartland, the children's stories of the Rev W. Awdry, the theatre criticism of Kenneth Tynan, and the travel writing of Bruce Chatwin.

Writers with roots in Birmingham have had an international influence. John Rogers compiled the first complete authorised edition of The Bible to appear in the English Language. Samuel Johnson was a leading literary figure of 18th century England and produced A Dictionary of the English Language. J. R. R. Tolkien is a dominant figure in the genre of fantasy fiction and one of the bestselling authors in the history of the world. W. H. Auden's work has been called the greatest body of poetry written in the English Language over the last century. Other notable contemporary writers from the city include David Lodge, Jim Crace, Roy Fisher, and Benjamin Zephaniah.

The city also has a tradition of distinctive literary subcultures including the Puritan writers who established the first Birmingham Library in the 1640s, the 18th century philosophers, scientists, and poets of the Lunar Society and the Shenstone Circle, the Victorian Catholic revival writers associated with Oscott College and the Birmingham Oratory, and the politically engaged 1930s writers of Highfield and the Birmingham Group. This tradition continues today with notable groups of writers associated with the University of Birmingham, the Tindal Street Press, and the city's burgeoning crime fiction, science fiction, and poetry scenes.

Medieval and early modern literature

Little evidence remains of the culture of medieval Birmingham, but with a priory and two chantries in the town itself, another priory in Aston, grammar schools in Deritend, Yardley and King's Norton, and the religious institutions of the Guild of the Holy Cross and the Guild of St. John, Deritend, the area would have supported a substantial community of learned religious men from the 13th century onwards.

The first Birmingham literary figure of lasting significance was John Rogers, who was born in Deritend in 1500 and educated at the Grammar School of the Guild of St. John, and who compiled, edited and partially translated the 1537 Matthew Bible, the first complete authorised version of the Bible to be printed in the English language. This was the most influential of the early English printed Bibles, providing the basis for the later Great Bible and Authorized King James Version. Rogers' translation of Philipp Melanchthon's Weighing of the Interim probably took place between Rogers' return to Deritend from Wittenberg in 1547 and his move to London in 1550, and is the earliest book written by a Birmingham author known to have been printed in England. Rogers' profile as a prominent figure in the Protestant church led to his arrest after the restoration of Roman Catholicism by Mary I, and on 14 February 1555 he became the first Protestant to be burned at the stake in the Marian Persecutions, leaving behind a written account of his three interrogations that was to establish him as an icon of martyrdom and the refusal to recant one's individual conscience. The poem he left to his children at his death, exhorting them to a Godly life and including his famous instruction for them to "Abhor that arrant Whore of Rome", was included in The New England Primer of 1690, becoming a major influence on the Puritan educational outlook of 18th century Colonial America.

It is in the mid 17th century that the first evidence of a distinctive and sustained literary culture emerges within Birmingham, based around a group of writers working at the heart of the town's growth as a centre of religious puritanism and political radicalism. John Barton, the headmaster of King Edward's School, was the author of The Art of Rhetorick in 1634 and The Latine Grammar composed in the English Tongue in 1652, but is best known for Prince Rupert's burning love for England, discovered in Birmingham's flames – a widely circulated, influential and vitriolic anti-Royalist tract that documented the sacking of the town by Prince Rupert of the Rhine at the Battle of Birmingham of 1643. Anthony Burgess wrote numerous sermons and theological works while the rector of Sutton Coldfield between 1635 and 1662, entering into a prolonged if amicable theological dispute in print with Richard Baxter that culminated in a face-to-face debate in Birmingham in September 1650. Francis Roberts was similarly prolific during his tenure as vicar of Birmingham's St Martin in the Bull Ring, with many of his works of popular or scholarly theology becoming nationally known and running through numerous editions. Thomas Hall was the master of the King's Norton Grammar School from 1629, and the minister of the adjacent St Nicolas' Church from 1650, but from the 1630s onwards was drawn into the radical circles of nearby Birmingham. He was the author of a long series of polemical works, combining both populist and erudite writing on religious and social matters. His 1652 volume The Font Guarded – a defence of the practice of infant baptism – was the first book known to have been published as well as written in Birmingham, and provides the first definite evidence of booksellers operating within the town. Between 1635 and 1642 Roberts, Hall and Barton were involved in establishing the first Birmingham Library, one of the earliest public libraries in England.

This culture of radical writing grew with the influx of Nonconformists and ejected ministers seeking asylum in Birmingham following the Act of Uniformity 1662 and the Five Mile Act 1665, which forbade dissenting ministers from living within five miles of a chartered borough but didn't apply to highly populous but unincorporated Birmingham. A vast number of essays and printed sermons on issues of religious controversy were produced by these radical clerics and their opponents over the following decades, in turn encouraging the further growth of the town's book trade. The era also saw the birth of a Birmingham street literature, with broadside ballads on Birmingham subjects surviving from the middle years of the 17th century. An Act of Parliament restricting the number of master printers in England meant that literature written and published in Birmingham could not be printed in the town, however, being produced only in London until the Act was repealed in 1693.

Literature of the Midlands Enlightenment Birmingham during the 18th century lay at the heart of the English experience of the Age of Enlightenment, as the free-thinking dissenting tradition developed in the town over the previous century blossomed into the cultural movement now known as the Midlands Enlightenment. Birmingham's literary infrastructure grew dramatically over the period. At least seven booksellers are recorded as existing by 1733 with the largest in 1786 claiming a stock of 30,000 titles in several languages. Books could be borrowed from the eight or nine commercial lending libraries established over the course of the 18th century, and from more specialist research-driven libraries such as the Birmingham Library and St. Philip's Parish Library. Evidence of printers working in Birmingham can be found from 1713, and the rise of John Baskerville in the 1750s saw the town's printing and publishing industry achieve international significance. By the end of the century Birmingham had developed a highly literate society, and it was claimed that the town's population of around 50,000 read 100,000 books per month.

The most significant author associated with Birmingham during the Enlightenment era was Samuel Johnson—poet, novelist, literary critic, journalist, satirist and biographer; the author of A Dictionary of the English Language; the leading literary figure of the 18th century; and "arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history". Johnson's background was closely tied to Birmingham and its book trade: his father maintained a bookstall on the Birmingham Market, his uncle and brother were both booksellers in the town, his mother was a native of King's Norton, and his wife Elizabeth ("Tetty"), whom he married when both were living in the town in 1735, was the widow of Henry Porter, a Birmingham merchant. Johnson's own literary career started in Birmingham where he lived for three years from 1732 after failing to establish himself as a teacher in his native Lichfield. His essays for Thomas Warren's Birmingham Journal were his first published writing, and it was in Birmingham – also for Warren – that he wrote and had published his first book: a translation of Jerónimo Lobo's A Voyage to Abyssinia. This "combination of the travelogue and religious polemic", with a preface written by Johnson himself, was pitched towards the dissenting culture of the Birmingham area and its widespread suspicion of religious fanaticism, but also aligned Johnson with the empirical and Renaissance humanist tradition of the post-reformation European intellectual elite, themes that would emerge repeatedly throughout his following work. This early work also established Johnson's practice of building his literary output around adapting and responding to the work of others – "a sort of rhetoric applied to the print world" – that was to form the basis of his prodigious output over the course of his career. Johnson maintained an extensive set of social and business connections in Birmingham throughout his lifetime and continued to visit the town regularly until a month before his death in 1784.