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Authors
Washington Irving (1783-1859)
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The Complete Works of Washington Irving (1969– ), organized under the chief editorship of Henry A. Pochmann, was continued by Herbert L. Kleinfield, then by Richard Dilworth Rust. The introductory essays to this edition provide an excellent history of Irving’s career. Three volumes of Irving’s writings are available in the Library of America series: History, Tales, and Sketches (1983), Bracebridge Hall; Tales of a Traveller; The Alhambra (1991), and Three Western Narratives (2004). The standard biographies are Stanley T. Williams’s Life of Washington Irving (1935) and William L. Hedges’s Washington Irving: An American Study 1802– 1832 (1965). Welcome is a reissue in three volumes of Irving’s nephew Pierre Munroe Irving’s Life and Letters (2001), originally published in 1864. Valuable works are Haskell Springer’s Washington Irving: A Reference Guide (1976) and T. Bowden’s Washington Irving Bibliography (1989). On reception and critical debate, see Andrew B. Myers’s A Century of Commentary on the Works of Washington Irving (1976), Edwin and Ralph M. Aderman’s Critical Essays on Washington Irving (1990), and James Tuttleton’s Washington Irving: The Critical Reaction (1993). An important critical study is Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky’s Adrift in the Old World: The Psychological Pilgrimage of Washington Irving (1988).
America's first international literary celebrity was born in New York City, the eleventh child in a close-knit family. After writing satirical sketches and essays for his brothers' newspapers for some years, Irving captured the nation's attention with the fictitious A History of New York, supposedly written by a curious old gentleman named Diedrich Knickerbocker. In May 1815, Irving left the country for what would be a seventeen-year sojourn in Europe, where he worked first as an importer in Liverpool, then as an attaché to the American legation in Spain, and finally as secretary to the American legation in London. His diverse works range from The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828) and The Alhambra (1832), both written during his stay in Spain, to A Tour of the Prairies (1835) and The Adventures of Captain Bonneville U.S.A. (1837), from studies of the American West written on his return from Europe, to a five-volume life of George Washington. However, his Sketch Book (1819-20), which included Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, remains his most recognized and influential contribution to American literature.
Questions for Discussion and Writing
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was published in February of 1820, as the last piece in the last installment of The Sketch Book. Rip Van Winkle had been published in the first installment in 1819. As our first truly successful "man of letters," Irving is delightfully hard to classify as a member of any particular literary movement. A voluminous writer, he turned out satires in the eighteenth-century tradition, comic and Romantic travel accounts and legends; he published histories, biographies, and parodies of both genres. In subject and style, his free range and geniality made him very popular, but also liable to charges, in the midst of his career, of being a bit too urbane and Continental to be a truly "American" writer. The best reply to that accusation is probably his lasting success in imagining and haunting the Hudson River landscape. For the Catskills, the Tarrytown region, and old Dutch New York, Irving is the maker of lasting legends.
1. The last words of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow -- in some ways the "last words" on all the stories in The Sketch Book -- are these by the storyteller: "I don't believe one half of it myself." These words come after the statement of three bits of wisdom which "the story was intended most logically to prove." Is this a didactic fable, a comic parody of such a tale, or both? By poking fun at both the listener and the storyteller, what effect does Irving achieve?
2. Take a moment and try reading The Legend of Sleepy Hollow as an allegory, the way that many people read Rip Van Winkle. With his mixture of book-learning and superstition, what might Ichabod Crane represent? How about Brom Bones? Work out an allegorical reading of the tale -- and then comment on the advantages and disadvantages of reading the story this way.
3. How does Irving explicitly and implicitly address the practice of telling "legends" and freewheeling imaginative tales?
