Washington Irving (1783 – 1859) Biography
from Elements of Literature, pages123-4
Washington Irving was born in New York City on April 8 in the year the Revolutionary War ended, and he was named for its hero, the victor of the critical Battle of Yorktown. When he was six years old, Irving and his nurse met the nation’s new President in a New York City shop. When he was presented to his namesake, the child who was to become America’s first professional writer was rewarded by the first President with a pat on the head.
Irving was the last of eleven children born to a successful and very religious hardware importer and his amiable wife. A small, sickly, but bright child, Irving was the darling of the family. He was indulgently allowed to slip away from the Irving home at 128 William Street to watch performances at the Little Theatre on John Street. And although his brothers attended college, he was kept at home and given a fragmentary education.
Still, the weight of his father’s practical concerns forced Irving to study law. At sixteen, he was apprenticed to a law office, and at nineteen he began to work for a judge, Josiah Hoffman.
Irving’s real interests, however, lay not in law offices but in the literary societies that were then popular among young men. He loved nothing more than friendly company in which he could try out his growing skill with humor. From an early age, Irving showed a genius for creating comic, fictional “narrators.” Using the pseudonym Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent. (an abbreviation for Gentleman), he began to write letters for a newspaper published by his brothers. Oldstyle was a broad caricature of British tradition who could not accept the simple values of the new nation. The idea of a very young man hiding behind this pompous pen name was intended as irreverent fun. But Oldstyle’s letters brought Irving favorable attention from his own family and from such prominent citizens as Aaron Burr.
The nineteenth century was the era of the Grand Tour, when fortunate young Americans were shipped off to visit European cathedrals and museums before settling down to a lifetime of moneymaking. At twenty-one, Irving visited France, Italy, Holland, and England. He filled notebooks with accounts of his travels, including one story of his capture by pirates on his way to Sicily. The Grand Tour was the beginning of Irving’s lifelong love affair with the rich culture and traditions of the Old World.
Back from Europe, Irving joined with other young men to publish Salmagundi, a humor magazine that made fun of the manners of the day and that greatly amused New Yorkers in 1807 and 1808. Still, Irving felt an obligation do “real work,” and thanks to Judge Hoffman he had passed the bar exams. When he found was in love with the judge’s daughter, Matilda, he began to make plans to marry. This forced Irving to take a serious view of his career and admit that his preoccupation with writing was affecting it.
While he was dealing with this problem, Matilda died of tuberculosis. Irving’s grief turned him further from the law and thrust him into a new literary project, A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty. This “history” was an elaborate hoax and was related by a highly unreliable narrator called Diedrich Knickerbocker. Published in 1809, this comic and irreverent “history” was a success and established Irving as the foremost young New York satirist.
In 1815, Irving was sent off to Liverpool, England, to look after the failing overseas branch of the family business. He found the business beyond repair, but he immersed himself in the British literary scene. He was particularly attracted to the Romantic novelist Sir Walter Scott, who gave the younger writer advice that was to make Irving’s reputation. Scott’s recommendation was that Irving read the German romantics and make use of folklore and legends.
Now Irving made the decision he had previously lacked the courage to make. He decided against putting further energy into business and its “sordid, dusty, soul-killing way of life.” He would give himself entirely to writing.
Returning to the United States in 1817, Irving brought with him the first drafts of stories based on German folk tales. “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” became sketches in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-1820). “Geoffrey Crayon” was a self-proclaimed American gentleman of “obscure origins” – another of Irving’s comic voices. The Sketch Book carried Irving to the summit of international success.
In Irving, the young nation had at last found a writer who provided positive answers to some urgent questions: Was America slavishly attached to British and European culture, or did it have a culture of its own? Would an authentic American literature be able to stand on its own legs?
Something about Irving’s comic narrators touched a responsiveness in the American public. Even though Irving borrowed openly from a European past, he brought to his material a droll new voice, as inflated as a preacher’s or a politician’s at one moment, self-mocking the next. It was a voice a new nation recognized as its own.
Irving had also given his country its first international literary celebrity. In the British novelist William Thackeray’s words, he was “the first ambassador from the New World of letters … to the old.” This was a role that Irving enjoyed exploiting to the fullest, at home and abroad. He had always loved parties and people and praise. Now he had access to the literary circles of the world. It was a remarkable achievement for the unpromising child of a middle-class American family.
During the final years of his rich life, Irving lived as the “squire” of Sunnyside, his picturesque Dutch farmhouse in Tarrytown, New York. He behaved as a “man of letters,” one whom Thackeray praised as “gentle, generous, good-humored … the complete gentleman.” Though he wrote a popular biography of Columbus and a sort of Spanish “sketch book” called The Alhambra, Irving never again wrote anything that matched the success of the two great comic tales in The Sketch Book. We remember him today for the tale of Rip Van Winkle who slept for twenty years, and the tale of the Headless Horseman who met the Yankee schoolteacher in Sleepy Hollow, New York.