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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, however, Irving wrote almost exclusively of native subject matter, enriching the indigenous literature of the United States with his three "Western" books--A Tour on the Prairies (1835), Astoria, or, Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains (1836), and The Rocky Mountains: Or, Scenes, Incidents, and Adventures in the Far West (1837), which was better known by its 1849 title, The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, U.S.A., in the Rocky Mountains and the Far West. These works, the productions of a leading author who was working at the height of his powers, were widely read and generally admired at the time of their issue. They became watershed writings for the literature of the American West, demonstrating some of the possibilities for portrayal of regions, populations, and modes of life that were as yet but little known.
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