Washington Irving
Washington Irving (1783-1859) was an American author, essayist, and diplomat best known for his short stories The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle. He was the first professional American author and also the first to achieve an international reputation.
He influenced such notable 19th-century authors as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman; "The unorthodox fantastical sensibilities he displayed in his tales … set the stage for the Romantic and Gothic writers that followed him" (Bradley, vii). Many of the characters in Irving's stories have become household names: Rip Van Winkle, Ichabod Crane, and, of course, the Headless Horseman. He was a notable innovator, with a sense of style and form that kept his writings fresh, and his short stories and sketches have endured as the first fictional chronicles of the American experience.
Early Life
Named after General George Washington (1732-1799), Washington Irving was born in New York City on 8 April 1783, five days after the signing of the Treaty of Paris, ending the American Revolutionary War with Great Britain. He was the last of eleven children born to a prominent Manhattan merchant family. His father, William, was Scottish-born while his mother, Sarah, was English-born. There is little evidence to suggest that Irving attended either public or private school. As a child he read widely in English literature: William Shakespeare, of course, but also the English essayist Joseph Addison as well as the Irish novelists Laurence Sterne and Oliver Goldsmith.
In 1804, he showed signs of tuberculosis, so his brothers sent him to Europe for two years where he kept extensive journals. Upon his return to the United States, he studied law under Judge Josiah Hoffman and passed the bar. Although he would practice law for a short time, he preferred to write. His extensive travels throughout England and the United States fueled his love of writing: "I was always fond of visiting new scenes and observing strange characters and manners. Even when a mere child I began my travels and my tours of discovery into foreign parts and unknown regions of my native city to the frequent alarm of my parents" (quoted in Bradley, 9). Irving came from a very close-knit family who encouraged his writing; this closeness was something that would remain part of his life. Writing was commonplace in the Irving home. For recreation, his brothers wrote poems and essays. His brother Peter had a newspaper The Morning Courier, and at the age of 19, using the pseudonym Jonathan Oldstyle, Irving wrote a number of satirical essays on the theater and New York society. In many of his writings, Irving often used pseudonyms, such as Jonathan Oldstyle or Geoffrey Crayon.
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