1820: Irving, Sleepy Hollow

The painting above, by Christian Schussle, was completed in 1864, five years after the death of Washington Irving. It is titled "Washington Irving and his Literary Friends at Sunnyside." South of Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow, Sunnyside was Irving's home on the banks of the Hudson River in New York between 1835 and his death in 1859. The painting demonstrates Irving's prominence in American literary history of the period. That's Irving sitting in the center with his legs crossed. The other writers portrayed are, from left to right, Henry T. Tuckerman, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., William Gilmore Simms, Fitz-Greene Halleck, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Parker Willis, William H. Prescott, (Irving), James Kirke Paulding, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Cullen Bryant, John Pendleton Kennedy, James Fenimore Cooper, and George Bancroft.

New York City

Irving published his first satirical essays on theatre and New York City society in 1802, when he was nineteen years old (Irving was born in New York City).

Poking Fun at Knickerbockers

Irving first achieved literary celebrity with a parodic work titled A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, which made fun of a more serious history published by another author in 1807 (The Picture of New York by Samuel Lathen Mitchell). Irving's book was narrated by "Diedrick Knickerbocker." 

The Best-Known American Writer in Europe

Irving lived in Europe between 1815 and 1832. It was there that he wrote "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" in 1819.

The publication in 1820 of The Sketch Book of Sir Geoffrey Crayon, which included "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle," helped establish Irving as "one of the 'inventors' of the modern short story" (Levine 511).

Irving was "the first American writers of the 19th century to achieve an international literary reputation"  and "the first American able to support himself solely through his writing" (Levine 511).

St. Christopher

In 1824, Irving moved to Spain, and four years later, he published a non-fiction history The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, "which became the basis for standard schoolroom accounts of Columbus during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries" (Levine 512).  The book was "stunningly inaccurate." For example, "The real Columbus studied Portuguese sailors’ maps, concluded that Southeast Asia lay just beyond the map edges, and set out to prove it. Irving’s Columbus sailed to prove that the world was round, thumbing his nose at European elites who insisted it was flat. Throughout the book, Columbus is valiant, intrepid, and eager to shed Old Europe—not coincidentally, exactly the qualities the United States saw in itself" (Burmila).

Oklahoma!

After returning to the States in 1832, he took a horseback journey into Oklahoma and subsequently published a book about his experiences (A Tour of the Prairies, 1835).

Over the course of a month, Irving's party crossed thorugh a dozen Oklahom counties. (Chronicles of Oklahoma / Oklahoma Historical Society)