Washington Irving

Washington Irving was an American writer, historian, biographer, and diplomat whose 50-year writing career produced multiple foundational documents of early-19th-century American literature — particularly his 1819–1820 short-story collection The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., which contained "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." He was born Washington Irving on April 3, 1783, in New York City, the youngest of 11 children of a Scottish-American merchant family. His father William Irving Sr. was a Scottish-Presbyterian-Covenanter merchant who had emigrated from Scotland in 1763, and his mother Sarah Sanders Irving was English. He was named after George Washington (whose New York Continental Army victory at Yorktown had concluded the Revolutionary War in October 1781).

His education at Benjamin Romaine's school in New York (1786–1798; without further formal education) launched his early-career path as a New York attorney's apprentice across 1798–1804. His 1809 publication of the satirical history A History of New York — under the pseudonym "Diedrich Knickerbocker" — launched his commercial breakthrough. The pseudonym produced the term "Knickerbocker" as a descriptor for native New Yorkers (and for the New York Knicks NBA basketball team, founded 1946).

His 1815–1832 17-year European residence — across England (1815–1820), the German states (1822–1825), Spain (1826–1829), and his return to England as the U.S. legation attaché (1829–1832) — produced his most-influential literary work. His 1819–1820 publication of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. — which contained the foundational American short stories "Rip Van Winkle" (set in the Catskill Mountains) and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (set in Tarrytown, New York) — produced his American literary breakthrough.

His subsequent works produced multiple foundational early-19th-century American literary works — particularly his 1828 four-volume A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, his 1832 The Alhambra (a tales-and-sketches collection set in the Moorish palace of Granada), and his 1855–1859 five-volume biography The Life of George Washington. His 1842–1846 service as the U.S. Minister to Spain produced his late-career diplomatic public profile. He died on November 28, 1859, at age 76, at his Sunnyside estate in Tarrytown, New York.

His name Washington derives from the Old English place-name meaning "settlement of Wassa's people." Washington has been a rare but enduring American boys' name across the 19th and 20th centuries.