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 The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon , Gent. (1819-1820) and The Alhambra (1832)--in his own lifetime Irving won popular and critical recognition as a biographer and a historian of Spain, the American Revolution, and events in the American Far West. At the time of his death in 1859 he was the premier popular interpreter of the national past. Despite a youthful attitude of mockery toward the methods and achievements of research, in his maturity he combined his seasoned narrative skills with breadth of study and a scrupulous respect for detail, producing historical writings that remained standard during the nineteenth century.

Irving's initial exercise in history, A History of New York (1809), by the fictitious...