"I seek only to blow a flute accompaniment in the national concert, and leave others to play the fiddle & frenchhorn," Washington Irving said in an 1819 letter. While his flute music for a time was a dominant strain, it still remains discernible in...

Washington Irving was America's first successful professional man of letters, a gifted teller of tales, especially as a native humorist, a romantic historian, and an influential prose stylist. As a writer by profession, with The Sketch Book (1819-1820)...

Washington Irving was America's first successful professional man of letters, a gifted teller of tales, especially as a native humorist, a romantic historian, and an influential prose stylist. As a writer by profession, with the Sketch Book (1819-1820)...

Washington Irving told an anecdote of his youth which shows both his propensity to delight in stories as well as his skepticism concerning them. A "lively boy, full of curiosity, of easy faith, and prone to relish a story the more it partook of the...

Washington Irving, America's first successful professional man of letters, was an essayist, humorist, historian, literary critic, antiquarian scholar, magazine journalist, and short-story writer. In addition, he wrote charming, observant travel pieces....

At the outset of Washington Irving's Bracebridge Hall (1822) Geoffrey Crayon, the author's quasi-autobiographical persona, makes the following observation: "I have always had an opinion that much good might be done by keeping mankind in good humor with...

Washington Irving, America's first professional man of letters, won his international reputation in the 1820s as a literary cosmopolitan, an interpreter especially of English and Spanish character, customs, and scenes. During the decade that followed,...

Washington Irving , America's first professional man of letters, devoted the latter half of his productive career primarily to historical writing. Though best remembered in the twentieth century as an essayist and writer of short fiction--the author of...

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...

The first American writer to be acclaimed as a literary figure of stature on both sides of the Atlantic, Washington Irving is today regarded as an important but obscure figure of American letters. Despite the decline in his popularity, our national...

Washington Irving was so important a figure, so self-conscious a writer, and so given to romantic irony and satirizing authorship that the meagerness of his literary criticism and scholarship is disappointing. Irving had little use for criticism as it...

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