Washington Irving : History, Tales, and Sketches: The Sketch Book / A History of New York / Salmagundi / Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent. (Library of America)
Washington Irving was an American short story writer, essayist, biographer, historian, and diplomat of the early 19th century. He was the first American author who found success not only in America, but also in Europe as well. He's actually considered the father of American literature because it is his writing that began shaping the American identity.
Background
Ethnicity:
He was the youngest of eleven children of a wealthy merchant father, a Scottish immigrant who had sided with the rebels during the Revolution.
Washington Irving was born on April 3, 1783, in New York City, to William Irving, Sr. and Sarah (née Sanders). From an early age, Washington was influenced by the literary tastes of his older brothers William and Peter.
When Irving was around the age of 15, yellow fever had broken out in Manhattan, so his parents sent him away with some friends in Tarrytown, New York. Tarrytown and the near-by village of Sleepy Hollow are, of course, where his later stories are set. It was during this time too that he first saw the Catskill Mountains, which set the scene for his character Rip Van Winkle's 20-year sleep.
Education
Academically, he wasn’t a dedicated student and instead preferred to attend theatre than sit in class. When he graduated from private school in 1798, however, he went into a law office as an attempt to avoid business, which he hated. He escaped a college education, which his father required of his older sons, but read intermittently at the law, notably in the office of Josiah Ogden Hoffman.
Career
In 1798, when Washington Irving graduated from private school, however, he went into a law office as an attempt to avoid business, which he hated.
In 1802, he started submitting letters to the New York Morning Chronicle under the pen name, Jonathan Oldstyle. This was the modest beginning of his legendary literary career.
Irving enjoyed his 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. 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. 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 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. 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 on November 28, 1859.
He was born in the family of an austere Presbyterian father and a genial Anglican mother.
Views
Quotations:
"A kind heart is a fountain of gladness, making everything in its vicinity freshen into smiles.
They who drink beer will think beer."
"Great minds have purposes; others have wishes."
"Love is never lost. If not reciprocated, it will flow back and soften and purify the heart."
"I am always at a loss at how much to believe of my own stories."
Personality
In his childhood he was a pretty goofy, adventurous kid who liked to go wandering and dreamed of the day when he could start traveling.
Later in life Washington Irving developed a great sense of humor, which transcended into his writings. Rather than use a tired, old narrator to tell his stories, he creates personas and uses pseudonyms, or fake names, to publish his stories.
One of his early pseudonyms was Diedrich Knickerbocker, another pseudonym Irving used was Geoffrey Crayon.
Connections
Washington Irving was engaged to marry Matilda Hoffmann, who died on April 26, 1809, at the age of 17. Irving never became engaged, or married anyone, after that tragic love.