The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Wr - Washington Irving [4]
1829 The historical novel A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada, written by Irving under the pseudonym Fray Antonio Agapida, is published.
1831 American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison begins publication of his anti-slavery newsletter The Liberator.
1832 Irving returns to America after a seventeen-year absence and is welcomed as a celebrity. He publishes The Alhambra, a series of sketches about Spain.
1833 Slavery is abolished in the British Empire.
1835 Irving’s A Tour of the Prairies, based on a recent trip through the American West, is published. He buys land in Tarrytown, New York, along the Hudson River, and builds a house he names Sunnyside. Samuel Langhorne Clemens (pseudonym Mark Twain) is born.
1836 Astoria, Irving’s history of American financier John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company, is published. Davy Crockett is killed at the Alamo during the Texas Revolution.
1837 Irving’s novel about the American frontier, The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, U.S.A., is published.
1839 American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow publishes Hyperion.
1840 After spending months doing research for a book on the conquest of Mexico, Irving abandons the project when he finds that noted historian William Prescott is writing a similar work. Irving becomes a regular contributor to the monthly Knickerbocker Magazine, a literary publication.
1841 American essayist and transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson publishes Essays.
1842 Irving is appointed American minister to Spain, a position he holds until 1846. English author Charles Dickens’s American Notes (a criticism of America) appears.
1844 Emerson publishes a second series of Essays.
1845 Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, and Other Poems appears.
1848 Irving becomes president of the Astor Library (now the New York Public Library).
1849 Irving’s Life of Oliver Goldsmith is published.
1850 Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter are published.
1852 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by American novelist and abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, is published in book form.
1854 Walden; or, Life in the Woods, by Henry David Thoreau, is published.
1855 Wolfert’s Roost, a compilation of Irving’s contributions to the Knickerbocker, is published. Irving begins publishing his five-volume biography of George Washington, The Life of George Washington.
1859 Shortly after finishing the final volume of The Life of George Washington, Washington Irving dies at Sunnyside on November 28.
The First American Man of Letters
In April 1789, George Washington arrived in New York City for his inauguration as the first president of the newly formed republic of the United States. He met with a hero’s welcome. In the weeks that followed, well-wishers and admirers regularly approached him in the streets, among them a Scottish-born woman who cornered him in a shop on Broadway. Drawing before her a six-year-old child, she exclaimed, “Please, Your Excellency, here’s a bairn that’s called after ye.” It was Washington Irving. In retrospect, the scene seemed prophetic. Later in life, after having established a reputation as the first American man of letters, Irving recalled in an interview how Washington “laid his hand upon my head, and gave me his blessing” (Williams, The Life of Washington Irving, vol. 1, p. 10; see “For Further Reading”). Three generations after the Revolutionary War, George Washington was revered as the father of our country. Irving likewise was recognized as a founding father of America’s national literature.
Such a title might strike today’s reader as an exaggeration. Irving’s best-known characters, Rip Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane, do not seem substantial enough to serve as foundational figures in an American literary tradition. However, the stories Irving set in Sleepy Hollow, a secluded village in the Hudson River Valley, provided American culture with a local habitation and a name. Along