irving washington the legend of sleepy hollow

The Bard of Sunnyside, creator of icons and ambassador of letters, was arguably the nation’s first exportable celebrity-and its first professional writer to make his living by his pen.

It is true that Irving’s stories of the Hudson River Valley, composed more than 150 years ago, still exert a magnetic pull on the American imagination, and that during his lifetime, and for nearly a century after, Washington Irving was, as he once wrote of his character Diedrich Knickerbocker, “a household word.” Nor can it be denied that Irving’s satires, “sketches,” and histories captivated readers on both sides of the Atlantic. Washington Irving is often tarred with this well-meaning brush, despite the fact that he was by no means the first American fiction writer, nor did he ever publish in that consummate American form: the novel. This is a truism in legend and history alike: Who prefers the dutiful Abraham to his rebellious sons, or Joseph to Jesus? Who-aside from their biographers-remembers the progenitor of Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers, or Marie Curie? There is no faster way to doom an author than to slap him with a patriotic paternity suit.

To refer to a writer as the Father of American Literature is the quickest way to consign him to anthologies, and to popular oblivion.

Irving washington the legend of sleepy hollow