Washington Irving
Washington Irving was the first native American to succeed as a professional writer. He remains important as a pioneer in American humor and the development of the short story. Irving was greatly admired and imitated in the 19th century. Toward the end of his career, his reputation declined due to the sentimentality and excessive gentility of much of his work ("Irving" 479). Washington Irving's time spent in the Hudson Valley and abroad contributed to his writing of The Devil and Tom Walker, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and Rip Van Winkle. Irving was born in New York City on April 3, 1783, the youngest of eleven children in a merchant family. Unlike his brothers, Irving did not attend nearby Columbia College, instead he was apprenticed in 1801 to a lawyer. In 1806, he passed the bar examination, but remained financially dependent on his family until the publication of The Sketch Book. In the meantime, Irving did odd jobs for the family as agent and lobbyist. It seems like he worked as little as possible, and for years pursued an amateur or semiprofessional interest in literature ("Irving" 479). In his free time, he read avidly and wandered when he could in the misty, rolling Hudson River valley
Knickerbocker History and the almost thirty parts of Irving's next critically acclaimed book, The Sketch life of the city. Washington Irving's second book, A History of New York, from the Beginning of the His descriptions of Sleepy Hollow and the people were so realistic and homey that old timers of the lower no matter how much he may add and romanticize. He often eliminates the roughness of the folk version but his folk lore is authentic and his use of it and their separate confrontations with the devil. The New England folk tale is told with very little addition
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Approximate Word count = 977
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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