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Washington Irving
1783–1859 · 76 years Tier II
A hoax about a missing Dutchman made him famous
He was born the week New York City learned that the Treaty of Paris had ended the war, and his mother named him after the general. At six he was presented to George Washington on a New York street, and the president blessed him. The rest of the making was less ceremonial. He was the youngest of 11 children in a William Street merchant family, an indifferent student who was slipping out to the theater by 14, and a yellow fever outbreak in 1798 sent him upriver to Tarrytown, where he absorbed Dutch customs and local ghost stories. He read law under Judge Josiah Ogden Hoffman and barely passed the bar in 1806. Then Hoffman's daughter Matilda, his fiancée, died at 17. He never married anyone.
Salmagundi, the magazine he started with his brother William in 1807, gave New York City the nickname Gotham. Two years later he planted missing-person notices in the Evening Post for one Diedrich Knickerbocker, a Dutch historian who had left a hotel bill unpaid — some city officials were worried enough to offer a reward — and then published A History of New York under the vanished man's name. The family trading firm went under anyway, and he declared bankruptcy in England. What he wrote instead, serialized across 1819 and 1820, was The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, which carried Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Because English printers pirated whatever they liked, he paid to bring out a London volume himself, and with the publisher John Murray worked out simultaneous publication in both countries.
His life of Columbus ran to 175 editions before the century was out and planted in American schoolrooms a thing that never happened. Irving wrote that Europeans before Columbus believed the earth was flat, and generations were taught it as fact. Six years later, short of money after bad investments, he accepted a commission from John Jacob Astor to write the history of Astor's fur-trading colony on the Pacific coast. He worked as a guest in Astor's house and shipped Astoria, a fawning account of the richest man in America, in February 1836 — this from the writer credited with coining the phrase the almighty dollar. Edgar Allan Poe's verdict was four words long: Irving is much over-rated. Others charged that he wrote of and for England.
He died of a heart attack in his bedroom at Sunnyside on November 28, 1859, eight months after finishing the fifth volume of his life of Washington. Flags went to half-mast across the country. The crowd at the Tarrytown church on December 1 was heavy enough that people worried about the floor. He was buried under a plain stone in what was then Tarrytown Cemetery, which in 1865 renamed itself Sleepy Hollow at his request. His histories fell out of fashion as scientific history took hold and late-19th-century scholars dismissed them as demiromances, before Samuel Eliot Morison and Douglas Southall Freeman argued them back. In 1940 he became the first American writer on a US postage stamp.
Lifespan
Washington Irving's life against the full span of the corpus.
Notable works
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Salmagundi
other
The magazine that gave New York City the nickname Gotham 1807 -
A History of New York
book
Published under the name of a Dutch historian he had invented and then reported missing 1809 -
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.
book
Serialized 1819 to 1820 — Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow 1820 -
A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus
book
The first book he signed with his own name, and the source of the flat-earth myth 1828 -
Tales of the Alhambra
book
Written out of his years in the Spanish archives 1832 -
Life of George Washington
book
Five volumes, finished eight months before he died 1859
Life in brief
with age at each point- April 3, 1783 aged 0 Born in Manhattan the week New York hears the war is over His mother named him after George Washington, whom he met at six.
- 1798 aged ~15 Sent up the Hudson to Tarrytown to escape yellow fever He picked up the Dutch stories he would spend a career reworking.
- 1806 aged ~23 Barely passes the bar examination By his own account he was a poor law student.
- December 6, 1809 aged 26 Publishes A History of New York after faking its author's disappearance His fiancée Matilda Hoffman had died at 17 while he was writing it.
- 1815 aged ~32 Sails for England to save the family trading firm Two years of effort ended in bankruptcy.
- 1820 aged ~37 The Sketch Book completes its run on both sides of the Atlantic
- 1832 aged ~49 Returns to the United States after 17 years abroad Critics at home had begun calling him a European writer.
- February 1842 aged 58 Appointed United States Minister to Spain Four years of Spanish factional warfare left him heartsick, by his own word.
- November 28, 1859 aged 76 Dies of a heart attack at Sunnyside
