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IRVING, WASHINGTON (1783-1859)

American essayist, historian, and writer of short stories, was born on Apr. 3, 1783, in New York City, the son of a prosperous Presby¬terian merchant and the youngest of eleven children. From his boyhood he had an appetite for the friendly but superficial culture of the growing city, and in 1802 he expressed his sensitivity to literature and the theatre in a series of papers on the drama, The Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent. In 1804 he was sent abroad by his indulgent brothers to improve his health, and he traveled widely on the Continent for two years.

When he returned, he resumed his perfunctory study of the law and was admitted to the bar, but he was far more interested in the social life of New York and Philadelphia and in his own literary pursuits. Before his twenty-sixth year he published two witty satires: Salmagundi, or the Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff and Others (1807-1808), which he wrote with James K. Paulding, William Irving, and others; and Diedrich Knickerbocker’s History of New Yor\ (1809), a satire on manners, politics, his¬tory, and government, which aroused the laughter of New York and in Europe won the respect of Walter Scott.

In 1809 Irving suffered a lasting grief in the death of his betrothed, Matilda Hoffman, and for the next few years he engaged in various ineffectual ventures in literature and editing. In the War of 1812 he wrote biographies of naval commanders and was aide-de-camp, with the rank of colonel, to the governor of New York. After the war, in 1815, he sailed again for Europe where he remained for seventeen years and became almost completely Europeanized.

Not long after his arrival in England, the family business which had supported Irving failed, and he was now obliged to depend on his writing for his income. His initial venture was The Sketch Boo\ of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-1820). The first number of this series contained Rip Van Winkle and three other tales, and the series was successfully published in New York and later in London. Bracebridge Hall, or the Humourists, which followed in 1822, was first published in London, as was Tales of a Traveller in 1824. The Tales, which combined an account of Irving’s winter at the Saxon court of Frederick Augustus with memories of Italy and New York, proved a failure. The winter of 1825 found Irving writing plays in Paris with John Howard Payne.

From 1826 to 1829 Irving served on the staff of the United States embassy in Spain. During this period he lived in the Alhambra at Granada and produced three of his best works. The History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Colum¬bus (1828) is a fictionalized history based on Navarrete’s Coleccion de Los Viajes y Descubrimientos (1825-1837). A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada (1829) is an imaginative, semi-scholarly work, as is The Alhambra: A Series of Tales and Sketches of the Moors and Spaniards (1832).

From 1829 to 1832 Irving served as attache at the American legation in London and then at last returned to the United States. Secure in fame as his country’s first man of letters, he now toured the West, traveled down the Ohio and the Mississippi, passed through the Osage country, and estab¬lished a kind of elegant connection with American frontier life which he expressed in A Tour on the Prairies (1835), Astoria (1836), and The Adventures of Captain Bonneville (1837). These books, however, did not show the vigorous understanding of the American pioneer that Cooper, for example, possessed; Irving was rather the representative of the polite and imitative tradition in American letters.

He set¬tled down in congenial surroundings at Sunnyside, on the Hudson, and there, except for the period from 1842 to 1846, when he served as minister to Spain, he lived on, issuing other correct works of literature, advising on political matters, passing judgment somewhat timidly on the more original younger men, such as Hawthorne and Poe, and in general sustaining his role as a distinguished American, known at the courts of Europe and in the literary circles of England, the friend of John Murray, William Gifford, Lord Byron and Walter Scott. He died at Tarrytown, New York, Nov. 28, 1859. Sunnyside was made a public shrine in 1947.

Despite the immortal quality in a few of his tales and sketches, Irving’s writing lacks intellectual weight. Its distinction lies in its craftsmanship, in the delicate symbolism and quiet humor of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle, in brief, in the author’s inimitable and finished style. To him Hawthorne and Longfellow turned in emulation, and in America he was among the first to create literature that had lasting artistic value.

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