Washington Irving

Who Was Washington Irving?

Washington Irving was the first American writer to achieve international literary fame — the man who demonstrated, at a moment when American literature was still largely dismissed by European critics as a provincial curiosity, that the new republic could produce imaginative writing worthy of serious attention. Born in New York City, the youngest of eleven children of a Scottish-born merchant, he read law but found his vocation in writing, and became famous with the publication of A History of New York (1809), a comic history of Dutch Manhattan written under the pseudonym Diedrich Knickerbocker.

His masterwork, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819–1820), published in installments from London, contains the two stories that secured his permanent place in American literature: “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” These tales, though set in the Hudson Valley Dutch communities of Irving’s childhood, draw on European folk traditions to create a distinctly American mythology — a sense of place, of the past, and of the uncanny that had no real precedent in American writing.

Irving spent seventeen years in Europe — in England, France, Germany, and Spain — absorbing the literary cultures of the Old World and bringing them back, transformed, to the New. His biography of Christopher Columbus (1828), his accounts of Spanish history and legend, and his later writings about the American West reveal a writer whose imagination was consistently drawn to the border between the historical and the mythological, the real and the legendary.

Irving is significant for TLA because his work raises the question of myth and its relationship to truth. His great stories are not realistic but legendary — they operate in the mode of folk tale, where the deeper truth is carried by the shape of the story rather than by historical accuracy. This is a mode that the biblical tradition knows intimately, and Irving’s work, read in that context, reveals dimensions that purely literary analysis misses.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• A History of New York — 1809 — as Diedrich Knickerbocker
• The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. — 1819–1820 — includes Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
• Bracebridge Hall — 1822
• Tales of a Traveller — 1824
• A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus — 1828
• The Alhambra — 1832