Washington Irving

Considered the first professional man of letters in the United States, Washington Irving (1783-1859) was influential in the development of the short story form and helped to gain international respect for fledgling American literature.

Following the tradition of the eighteenth-century essay exemplified by the elegant, lightly humorous prose of Joseph Addison and Oliver Goldsmith, Irving created endearing and often satiric short stories and sketches. In his most-acclaimed work, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-20), he wove elements of myth and folklore into narratives, such as "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, " that achieved almost immediate classic status. Although Irving was also renowned in his lifetime for his extensive work in history and biography, it was through his short stories that he most strongly influenced American writing in subsequent generations and introduced a number of now-familiar images and archetypes into the body of the national literature.

Irving was born and raised in New York City, the youngest of eleven children of a prosperous merchant family. A dreamy and ineffectual student, he apprenticed himself in a law office rather than follow his elder brothers to nearby Columbia College. In his free time, he read avidly and wandered when he could in the misty, rolling Hudson River Valley, an area steeped in local folklore and legend that would serve as an inspiration for his later writings.

As a nineteen-year-old, Irving began contributing satirical letters under the pseudonym Jonathan Oldstyle to a newspaper owned by his brother Peter. His first book, Salmagundi; or, The Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq., and Others (1807-08), was a collaboration with another brother, William, and their friend James Kirke Paulding. This highly popular collection of short pieces poked fun at the political, social, and cultural life of the city. Irving enjoyed a second success in 1809 with A History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, a comical, deliberately inaccurate account of New York's Dutch colonization narrated by the fictitious Diedrich Knickerbocker, a fusty, colorful Dutch-American. His carefree social life and literary successes were shadowed at this time, however, by the death of his fiancee, Matilda Hoffmann, and for the next several years he floundered, wavering between a legal, mercantile, and editorial career. In 1815 he moved to England to work in the failing Liverpool branch of the family import-export business. Within three years the company was bankrupt, and, finding himself at age thirty-five without means of support, Irving decided that he would earn his living by writing. He began recording the impressions, thoughts, and descriptions which, polished and repolished in his meticulous manner, became the pieces that make up The Sketch Book. The volume was brought out under the pseudonym of Geoffrey Crayon, who was purportedly a good-natured American roaming Britain on his first trip abroad.

The Sketch Book comprises some thirty parts: about half English sketches, four general travel reminiscences, six literary essays, two descriptions of the American Indian, three essentially unclassifiable pieces, and three short stories: "Rip Van Winkle," "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,"and "The Spectre Bridegroom." Although only the last-named tale is set in Germany, all three stories draw upon the legends of that country. The book was published almost concurrently in the United States and England in order to escape the piracy to which literary works were vulnerable before international copyright laws, a shrewd move that many subsequent authors copied. The miscellaneous nature of The Sketch Book was an innovation that appealed to a broad range of readers; the work received a great deal of attention and sold briskly, and Irving found himself America's first international literary celebrity. In addition, the book's considerable profits allowed Irving to devote himself full-time to writing.

Remaining abroad for more than a decade after the appearance of The Sketch Book, Irving wrote steadily, capitalizing on his international success with two subsequent collections of tales and sketches that also appeared under the name Geoffrey Crayon. Bracebridge Hall; or, the Humorists: A Medley (1822) centers loosely around a fictitious English clan that Irving had introduced in several of the Sketch Book pieces. Bracebridge Hall further describes their manners, customs, and habits, and interjects several unrelated short stories, including "The Student from Salamanca" and "The Stout Gentleman." Tales of a Traveller (1824) consists entirely of short stories arranged in four categories: European stories, tales of London literary life, accounts of Italian bandits, and narrations by Irving's alter-ego, Diedrich Knickerbocker. The most enduring of these, according to many critics, are "The German Student," which some consider a significant early example of supernatural fiction, and "The Devil and Tom Walker," a Yankee tale that like "Rip Van Winkle" draws upon myth and legend for characters and incident. After 1824 Irving increasingly turned his attention from fiction and descriptive writing toward history and biography. He lived for several years in Spain, serving as a diplomatic attache to the American legation while writing a life of Christopher Columbus and a history of Granada. During this period he also began gathering material for The Alhambra (1832), a vibrantly romantic collection of sketches and tales centered around the Moorish palace in Granada.

Irving served as secretary to the American embassy in London from 1829 until 1832, when he returned to the United States. After receiving warm accolades from the literary and academic communities, he set out on a tour of the rugged western part of the country, which took him as far as Oklahoma. The expedition resulted in three books about the region, notably A Tour on the Prairies (1835), which provided easterners with their first description of life out west by a well-known author. Irving eventually settled near Tarrytown, New York, at a small estate on the Hudson River, which he named Sunnyside. Apart from four years in Madrid and Barcelona, which he spent as President John Tyler's minister to Spain, Irving lived there the rest of his life. Among the notable works of his later years is an extensive biography of George Washington, which Irving worked on determinedly, despite ill health, from the early 1850s until a few months before his death in 1859.

The Sketch Book prompted the first widespread critical response to Irving's writings. Reviewers in the United States were generally delighted with the work of their native son, and even English critics, normally hostile in that era to American authors, accorded the book generally favorable— if somewhat condescending—notice. Among the pieces singled out for praise in the early reviews were most frequently the three short stories, particularly "Rip Van Winkle." Critics found Irving's style pleasingly elegant, fine, and humorous, although some, including Richard Henry Dana, perceived a lack of intellectual content beneath the decorative surface. Dana also observed that in adopting the authorial persona of Geoffrey Crayon—with his prose style modeled after the eighteenth-century essayists—Irving lost the robustness, high color, and comic vigor of his previous incarnations as Jonathan Oldstyle, Launcelot Langstaff, and Diedrich Knickerbocker, an observation that was echoed by later critics. Subsequent "Crayon" works, such as Bracebridge Hall, Tales of a Traveller, and The Alhambra, while generally valued for their prose style, tended to prompt such complaints as that by the Irish author Maria Edgeworth that "the workmanship surpasses the work."

Beginning in the 1950s, however, critics began to explore technical and thematic innovations in Irving's short stories. These include the integration of folklore, myth, and fable into narrative fiction; setting and landscape as a reflection of theme and mood; the expression of the supernatural and use of Gothic elements in some stories; and the tension between imagination and creativity versus materialism and productivity in nineteenth-century America. Many critics read Rip's twenty-year sleep as a rejection of the capitalistic values of his society—ferociously personified by the shrewish Dame Van Winkle—and an embracing of the world of the imagination. Ichabod Crane, too, has been viewed by such critics as Robert Bone as representing the outcast artist-intellectual in American society, although he has been considered, conversely, as a caricature of the acquisitive, scheming Yankee Puritan, a type that Irving lampooned regularly in his early satirical writings.

Today, many critics concur with Fred Lewis Pattee's assertion that the "American short story began in 1819 with Washington Irving." Commentators agree, moreover, that in "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," Irving established an artistic standard and model for subsequent generations of American short story writers. As George Snell wrote: "It is quite possible to say that Irving unconsciously shaped a principal current in American fiction, whatever may be the relative unimportance of his own work." In their continuing attention to the best of Irving's short fiction, critics affirm that while much of Irving's significance belongs properly to literary history, such stories as "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" belong to literary art.

Further Reading

Bleiler, E. F., editor, Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror 2: A. E. Coppard to Roger Zelazny, Scribners, 1985, pp. 685-91.

Bowden, Mary Weatherspoon, Washington Irving, Twayne, 1981.

Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography: Colonization to the American Renaissance, 1640-1865, Gale, 1988.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale, Volume 3: Antebellum Writers in New York and the South, 1979, Volume 11: American Humorists, 1800-1950, 1982, Volume 30: American Historians, 1607-1865, 1984, Volume 59: American Literary Critics and Scholars, 1800-1850, 1987, Volume 73: American Magazine Journalists 1741-1850, 1988, Volume 74: American Short-Story Writers before 1880, 1988.

Harbert, Earl N., and Robert A. Rees, editor, Fifteen American Authors before 1900: Bibliographic Essays on Research and Criticism, University of Wisconsin Press, 1984.

Hedges, William L., Washington Irving: An American Study, 1802-1832, Johns Hopkins Press, 1965.

Leary, Lewis, Washington Irving, University of Minnesota Press, 1963. □

Irving, Washington (1783–1859),was born in New York City, the youngest of 11 children of a wealthy merchant who had sided with the rebels in the Revolution. Precocious and impressionable, the boy was early influenced by the literary interests of his brothers William and Peter, but in 1798 concluded his education at private schools and entered a law office. His legal studies soon lost their appeal, although he continued in various offices until 1804, varying his occupation by a frontier journey (1803) through upper New York state and into Canada, and by writing for the Morning Chronicle and The Corrector, newspapers edited by his brother Peter. For the Chronicle (1802–3) he wrote the Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent., a series of youthful satires on New York society, which won him recognition. To restore his failing health and to further his education, he traveled in Europe (1804–6), where he collected material later used in stories and essays.

Although he was admitted to the bar upon his return, he lost interest in the law and turned seriously to literature. Salmagundi; or, The Whim‐Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq., and Others (1807–8) is a series of satirical miscellanies concerned with New York society. The leading essays were written by Irving, his brothers, and William Irving's brother‐in‐law, J.K. Paulding, all members of the group known as the “Nine Worthies” or “Lads of Kilkenny” of “Cockloft Hall.” Federalist in politics, conservative in social attitude, and humorous in intention, these early essays represent the position and manner to which Irving was to cling throughout his career. He was now famous as author, wit, and man of society, and, to further his reputation, turned to the creation of the comic Dutch‐American scholar Diedrich Knickerbocker, on whose burlesque History of New York he was occupied until 1809. This work, called “the first great book of comic literature written by an American,” although ostensibly concerned with the history of the Dutch occupation was also a Federalist critique of Jeffersonian democracy and a whimsical satire on pedantry and literary classics.

Before its completion, Irving suffered a tragic loss in the death of his fiancée, Matilda Hoffman. According to sentimental biographers, who disregard later love affairs, he remained a bachelor to be faithful to her memory. Certainly he was profoundly affected at the time. In spite of the success of the History, he deserted creative literature during the next six years, when he was occupied in business with his brothers, in collecting the poems of Thomas Campbell (1810), in editing the Analectic Magazine (1813–14), a popular miscellany of reprints from foreign periodicals, and in social and political activities in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington. Toward the end of the War of 1812, he served as an aide‐de‐camp to the governor, and in 1815 he planned a cruise to the Mediterranean with Decatur; but, when this became impossible, he sailed alone for Liverpool, to take charge of the family business there.

During the next two years, he tried desperately to maintain the failing business, but in 1818 it went into bankruptcy, and he was forced to write for a living. He had already been impressed by the beauties of the English countryside as interpreted by the romantic poets, and, encouraged by Scott, now returned to writing his most successful work, The Sketch Book (1819–20), containing familiar essays on English life, and Americanized versions of European folk tales in “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” As Geoffrey Crayon, the pseudonym by which the book was signed, Irving was now a celebrity, lionized in English and French society, and the intimate of such men as Scott, Byron, and Moore. In Paris (1820) he wrote plays with J.H. Payne, a collaboration to which he occasionally returned for several years. Bracebridge Hall (1822) is another book of romantic sketches, less important than The Sketch Book, but equally well received.

Continuing his search for fictional materials, Irving now traveled in Germany (1822–23), spending the winter at Dresden, where he fell in love with an English girl, Emily Foster, who seems to have refused his proposal of marriage. After a year in Paris, he returned to England and published Tales of a Traveller (1824), so adversely criticized that Irving was nearly discouraged from further literary activity. After two unproductive years in France, during which he is supposed to have vied with Payne for the affections of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, he became a diplomatic attaché in Spain (1826–29), living for a time in Madrid at the home of bibliographer Obadiah Rich, and engaged in research for his scholarly but popular History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828), based principally on the work of the Spanish scholar Navarrete. This was followed by A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada (1829), and a “Spanish Sketch Book,” The Alhambra (1832), recounting Spanish legends and describing the famous monument.

Irving was secretary of the U.S. legation in London (1829–32), and then returned to New York, after an absence of 17 years, to be welcomed enthusiastically as the first American author to achieve international fame. Again seeking picturesque literary backgrounds, he made an adventurous trip to the Western frontier. This was described in A Tour on the Prairies, published as a part of The Crayon Miscellany⧫ (3 vols., 1835). The tour also resulted in Astoria (1836), an account of the fur‐trading empire of John Jacob Astor, written with Pierre Irving; and The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, U.S.A. (1837). Irving's Western Journals were published in 1944.

After a few years at his home, Sunnyside, during which he declined the nomination for mayor of New York City and the secretaryship of the navy offered him by Van Buren, as well as giving up a plan to write a Conquest of Mexico in favor of Prescott, Irving returned to his favorite place of exile, becoming minister to Spain (1842–45). His position was made difficult by the Spanish insurrection (1843), and after his resignation two years later he spent a year in London on a diplomatic mission concerning the Oregon Question. Again at Sunnyside, he passed the remaining 13 years of his life in the company of his beloved nieces and innumerable friends, acknowledged as the leading American author, in spite of his waning powers, as evidenced in Oliver Goldsmith (1840), a biography of one of his literary masters; A Book of the Hudson (1849) and Wolfert's Roost (1855), collections of sketches; Mahomet and His Successors (2 vols., 1849–50), conventional biographies; and the monumental Life of Washington (5 vols., 1855–59), planned as early as 1825, but completed in the last year of his life, just before his health finally failed. Bare of the graces of his early writing, this triumph of scholarship crowned an erratic career that seldom retained its literary focus for more than a few years at a time, but which served in many ways to consolidate the culture of the U.S. and Europe. Unlike his contemporary, Cooper, Irving saw the European past in an aura of romance, and, except for the gentle satire of his early works, consistently avoided coming to grips with modern democratic life. His graceful, humorous, stylistically careful writing is in the tradition of Addison, Steele, and Goldsmith. In subject and method he sought the traditional and the picturesque. A scholarly edition of his Complete Works began publication in 1969.

Irving, Washington (1783–1859), author and critic. If this great early American writer is best remembered for his biographies, histories, and romantic short stories, he was also an important, if largely indirectly so, figure in the American theatre of his day. Among his first published pieces were “The Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent.,” which were serialized in 1802–03 in the New York Morning Chronicle and also published separately and which offered his personal views of contemporary plays and performers. Further observations on the theatre, usually satirical and not nearly as important, appeared in Salmagundi, which he wrote in 1807–08 with his brother, William, and J. K. Paulding. Both in America and in Europe, where he spent some time, Irving made many important theatrical friends, including John Howard Payne, with whom he collaborated on half a dozen plays, the most important of which were Charles the Second; or, The Merry Monarch (1824) and Richelieu, A Domestic Tragedy (1826). The former enjoyed widespread popularity but the failure of the latter and other works prompted Irving to write to Payne, “I am sorry to say I cannot afford to write any more for the theatre. . . . The experiment has satisfied me that I should never at any time be compensated for my trouble.” In the long run, it was other men's adaptations of his stories, especially Rip Van Winkle, that made him an enduring figure in our theatre.

Irving, Washington (1783–1859), born in New York, the son of an Englishman. He published (with his brother William Irving and J. K. Paulding) a series of satirical essays and poems collected in Salmagundi: or, The Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq. and Others (1808). This was followed by his highly successful burlesque A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by ‘Diedrich Knickerbocker’, a pseudonym chosen to represent the solid, phlegmatic Dutch burgher created by Irving. Irving visited England and met Sir W. Scott, T. Moore, T. Campbell, John Murray, and others; on his return, he wrote The Sketch Book (1820), essays and tales under the pseudonym ‘Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.’, which contains sketches of English life, essays on American subjects, and American adaptations of German folk tales (including ‘Rip Van Winkle’ and ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’). It was followed by other popular works, including Bracebridge Hall (1822), which features Squire Bracebridge, a sort of 19th-cent. de Coverley. Some of his subsequent works were inspired by his period as diplomatic attaché in Spain (1826–9), including Legends of the Alhambra (1832). He was hailed in his own country as the first American author to have achieved international fame.

Irving, Washington (1783–1859), the first American author to gain recognition abroad. Chiefly remembered as a historian and as the writer of romantic sketches and tales, he also served as a diplomat. In 1802–3 he published, in the New York Morning Chronicle, a series entitled ‘The Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle’, several of which give a vivid picture of the contemporary New York stage. He was co-author of Salmagundi (1807–8), which includes a number of satiric letters on the state of the theatre. He later collaborated with John Howard Payne in several plays. Their Charles II (1824) and Richelieu (1826), both adapted from French originals, were particularly successful. His short story ‘Rip Van Winkle’ (first published in 1819) was adapted for the stage by James Hackett in 1825. Other adaptations followed, the most successful being that of Joseph Jefferson III and Dion Boucicault in 1865, in which Jefferson scored his greatest success.

Irving, Washington (1783–1859) US essayist and short-story writer. He wrote the burlesque History of New York (1809) under the pseudonym Dietrich Knickerbocker. He is most famous for the stories Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which were written during his 17 years in Europe. He returned to the USA in 1832, where his continuing literary output included Astoria (1836).

http://www.online-literature.com/irving/