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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 marvelous," the young Irving met an old "bottle-nosed fellow named Bugbee," who "abused my juvenile ear outrageously with his legendary fables." The boy had a temperament conducive to both these responses. "When I was very young," he wrote in an autobiographical note to Mrs. Amelia Foster, "I had an irrepressible flow of spirits that often went beyond my strength. Everything was fairy land to me." On the other hand this clever youngest son of William and Sarah Sanders Irving indulged in wit and satire dependent on the sort of ironic skepticism found in his first publications, letters in the New York Morning Chronicle (1802-1803) published under the signature of "Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent."
Born in New York City at the close of the American Revolution, Washington Irving had eleven years of elementary schooling, after which he studied law in an attorney's office rather than going on to college.
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