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within a story, as with the interrelated series that includes “Adventure of the Mysterious Picture,” “Adventure of the Mysterious Stranger,” and “The Story of the Young Italian.” Although Irving originally intended to use his travels through Germany and Italy as the organizational premise for Tales, he abandoned this realist narrative framework and told his stories as he would. He felt that the final manuscript was uneven but also believed it contained some of his best writing. Critics in England and America unfortunately did not agree. They found it imitative and even vulgar for its moments of sexual innuendo and for the darker psychological strain of tales such as “Adventure of the German Student.” As a critic in the October 1824 issue of the Westminster Review made painfully clear, Irving’s vogue in literary London had passed.

Geoffrey’s fame was occasioned by the fact of his being a prodigy; a prodigy for show—such as La Belle Sauvage, or the learned pig: up to the time of Geoffrey, there were no Belles Lettres in America, no native litterateurs, and he shot up at once with true American growth, a triumphant proof of what had so long been doubted and denied, namely, that the sentimental plant may flourish even on that republican soil.

But now, this critic continued, Irving catered to the tastes of a shallow, bourgeois audience, providing them with “a little pathos, a little sentiment to excite tears as a pleasurable emotion,” yet little of “solid matter.” Still, Tales sold well and Irving’s reputation with the public was not spoiled by the poor critical reception it received.

His interest in writing fiction was dampened, though, and he turned to popular history and biography instead, like that which he had written in A History of New York but without the satirical overtone. He traveled to Madrid in 1826 and, at the suggestion of Alexander Everett, the American minister to Spain, began translating Martin Fernandez de Navarette’s history of Columbus. He eventually abandoned the idea of a direct translation, choosing to write a biography of his own from sources he culled from the private library of Obadiah Rich, an American consul in Madrid to whom Everett introduced him. His A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus was published in 1828, and the other works associated with Irving’s Spanish period soon followed: A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada (1829), Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus (1831), and The Alhambra (1832).

With The Alhambra, Irving returned to fiction, and in that same year, he returned to America after a seventeen-year absence. He continued to write prolifically, producing dozens of stories for the Knickerbocker, a magazine named after one of his most famous narrators, and three novel-length books—A Tour of the Prairies (1835), Astoria (1836), and The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, U.S.A. (1837). None of these, however, captured the depth of emotion Irving was able to distill into The Sketch-Book. In 1842 he returned to Europe, having agreed to serve as minister to Spain under the Tyler administration. When he returned to America for good in 1846, he retired to Sunnyside, the “neglected cottage” situated on the banks of the Hudson, which he had renovated as his own Sleepy Hollow retreat. The major work of his later years was a five-volume biography of his namesake, The Life of George Washington. In 1859 he finished the final volume with the help of his nephew Pierre Irving, who had taken over the management of his literary estate. He died that same year, having completed this last great memorial to the nation whose birth coincided with his own.

Peter Norberg received his Ph.D. from Rice University in 1998. Since 1997 he has been Assistant Professor of English at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. A specialist on the writers asso ciated with the transcendentalist movement, he has written and lectured extensively on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and the critical reaction to transcendentalism in the writings of Nathaniel