He was born in New York, which as the first capital of the new nation was a cultural magnet. Among those drawn there was George Washington, whom Irving was named for and to whom he was briefly presented outside a Manhattan shop. And the city itself, still small in size but already figuring on the world's maps as a major port, was also a gateway to inland Amer- ica. Bustling, commercial, scheming, and visionary, it was a remarkable place to grow up for an imaginative and adventurous youngster.
Irving had a lifelong tendency to write. Even as a schoolboy this showed in the habit he joked about later of surreptitiously penning compositions for classmates—who in turn did his arithmetic. It is not clear why, like several brothers in his large family, Irving did not go on to nearby Columbia College. But certainly his local education provided ample models of good writing—in the imported neoclassical mode much in fashion and in the readily available works of essayists such as Addison, Goldsmith, and Johnson. In later autobiographical comment he would attest to the fascination held for him, early on, by books of travel, ancient and modern, books of history, both factual and inventive, and the slapstick and satire in Cervantes, Fielding, and Rabelais.
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