Washington Irving Biography

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Dictionary of Literary Biography on Washington Irving

"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 the national concert. Rip Van Winkle is part of American mythology, and Irving's legend of Sleepy Hollow is still read. There continues to be an audience, too, for the rest of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-1820), Diedrich Knickerbocker's A History of New-York (1809), The Alhambra (1832), and Irving's Life of George Washington (1855- 1859). Other works such as Tales of a Traveller (1824), with its memorable story of "The Devil and Tom Walker," Astoria (1836), and The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828) remain appealing.

In his time, as Eugene Current-García notes in his 1973 essay in Studies in Short Fiction, Irving set "the pattern for the artistic re-creation of common experience in short fictional form." Irving properly has been called the Father of the American Short Story as well as, according to William Makepeace Thackeray in "Nil Nisi Bonum," "the first Ambassador whom the New World of Letters sent to the Old." "For a long time," according to Charles Dudley Warner in Washington Irving (1881), "he was the chief representative of the American name in the world of letters." Irving was praised by Walter Scott; George Gordon, Lord Byron; Samuel Taylor Coleridge; and Thomas Moore; read repeatedly by Charles Dickens; admired by Fanny Kemble, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Nathaniel Hawthorne; and considered by William Cullen Bryant to be the fountainhead of American fiction and history.

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