Early Life / Background
Washington Irving was born in 1783, one week after the Revolutionary War ended, as the youngest of 11 children. His family lived on William Street in what is now New York’s Financial District. Irving was born into a prosperous merchant family of Scottish-English descent; his father William Irving was a successful businessman who supported American independence. At age 6 (1789), Irving met his namesake George Washington during Washington’s presidential inauguration year—an encounter that Irving commemorated in a small watercolor painting that continued to hang in his home.
In 1798, Irving moved to Tarrytown, New York to escape yellow fever epidemics, where he was introduced to the adjacent town of Sleepy Hollow. He frequently explored the Catskill Mountain Range, which became the setting for many of his stories including “Rip Van Winkle.” His early exposure to Dutch folklore and Hudson Valley legends during his time in Tarrytown significantly influenced his later literary works. Irving received a good education but was more interested in literature than formal studies. He studied law (though poorly) and was admitted to the New York bar in 1806, but his only notable court case involved defending his friend Aaron Burr after Burr killed Alexander Hamilton in their 1804 duel.
Literary Career
Washington Irving holds the distinction of being America’s first professional man of letters, making his living primarily through creative writing and becoming the first American writer to achieve international recognition and acceptance by the English literary establishment. Irving wrote under several pseudonyms, most notably Diedrich Knickerbocker, and began his career with satirical essays and his comic “History of New York” (1809).
After the War of 1812, Irving traveled to Europe in 1815, where he remained for the next 17 years. The failure of his brother’s hardware import firm in 1818 freed Irving to focus on his writing, spurred by encouragement from novelist Sir Walter Scott. Irving’s masterpiece, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-20), has a historical importance few American books can match, as no previous American book achieved significant popular and critical success in England, the only arena of opinion that mattered at the time.
Irving perfected the American short story and was the first American writer to set his stories firmly in the United States, even as he drew from German and Dutch folklore. He is credited as one of the first to write in the vernacular without obligation to present morals or be didactic, writing stories simply to entertain rather than to enlighten. “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” have been called the first American short stories, both being Americanized versions of German folktales that are distinctly American in setting and feature innovative narrative techniques including unreliable narrators.
Irving found real-life inspiration for his “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” characters in the Old Dutch Burial Ground in Sleepy Hollow, including Catriena Van Tassell (who inspired Katrina Van Tassel) and Abraham Marttling (who may have inspired Brom Bones). He named Ichabod Crane after Colonel Ichabod B. Crane, who served alongside Irving in the War of 1812. After returning to America in 1832, Irving settled at his estate “Sunnyside” in Tarrytown, where he continued writing prolifically, including his five-volume biography “The Life of George Washington” and the fictionalized account “Wolfert’s Roost.”
Cultural Impact
Irving’s relationship with America was fundamentally divided, embodying the cultural tensions of a young nation still deeply influenced by European traditions. Irving was seen as America’s literary declarer of independence, though paradoxically his work often looked backward rather than forward, with “Rip Van Winkle” describing the birth of America as a Fall and Irving seeming more at home in the Old World. This divided sensibility stemmed from his 17-year residence in Europe as a diplomat, businessman, and writer, which created a complex relationship between his American birth and the European culture that still dominated American intellectual life.
Irving’s “History of New York” challenged the emergent national consensus by relating a tale of declension in which America begins as “a second Eden” and then succumbs to democracy and materialism, providing a conservative challenge to glorifying national progress. His stories reflect this cultural ambivalence: while “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” are set in distinctly American landscapes, they draw heavily from German and Dutch folklore, representing Irving’s attempt to create an American mythology by adapting European literary traditions.
Irving created humane characters that were simple, honest, vulnerable, and average, using the supernatural as a means to discuss the value of sympathy in an increasingly busy and complex world. In “Rip Van Winkle,” Irving created a new kind of national mascot, the antidote to the unscrupulous, money-hungry men that many Americans felt were apt symbols of their expanding nation. Yet Rip’s twenty-year sleep through the American Revolution suggests Irving’s own ambivalence about American progress and democracy.
Irving was the first person to call New York City “Gotham,” derived from the Anglo-Saxon “got-ham” meaning “goat village.” This reference drew from the English legend of Gotham, Nottinghamshire, where citizens feigned madness to avoid King John’s visit and taxes—Irving was essentially calling New Yorkers foolish or crazy, reflecting his satirical view of American democracy as potential “mobocracy.”
The American Romantic movement of the 1840s was highly indebted to Irving’s legacy, as American literature really came into its own during this period. Major authors including Dickens, Thackeray, Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe acknowledged their indebtedness to Irving. Irving significantly influenced American holiday traditions, helping evolve St. Nicholas into the modern Santa Claus and popularizing Christmas customs like kissing under mistletoe. He also wrote a satirical biography of Christopher Columbus in 1828 that helped Italian immigrants establish their place in American society.
Irving’s use of satire, requiring keen wit and insight, helped project the image of an enlightened and intelligent society while establishing self-deprecating humor as a staple of American literary tradition. His divided cultural loyalties—American by birth but European by inclination and experience—made him uniquely positioned to create literature that could speak to both audiences while helping establish a distinctly American voice that was nonetheless sophisticated enough to gain European respect.