A Washington Irving Sketch Book

Reflections on an American Writer

Phillip Lopate

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9780691284453
  9780691284439
• eBook ISBN:
  9780691291802
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

A richly textured portrait of an American man of letters who came to exemplify the writer’s life with all its setbacks and triumphs

Washington Irving (1783–1859) is often considered America’s first professional writer, supporting himself and his family amid the ups and downs of literary fortune. He burst on the scene with his uproarious History of New York, followed by his Sketch Book, a collection of personal essays and short stories that includes “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” As an essayist and teacher, Phillip Lopate identifies with Irving, inspired by his humane and elegant prose style, and by Irving’s courage and persistence in the face of setbacks and his own limitations as a writer.

In this illuminating book, Lopate reflects on Irving and his extensive body of work through a series of warmly sympathetic sketches of his own. Irving was the first American writer to attain international renown, attracting such devoted fans as Charles Dickens and Lord Byron, and while he may have been overrated in his day, he has since become undeservedly neglected. A lifelong bachelor, he was urbane, popular, and socially adept, mixing with royals as well as paupers, yet underneath it all he was a loner and a melancholic. Lopate describes how Irving constantly reinvented himself, first as a satirist, then a belletrist, at times a hack writer, and finally as a serious biographer of figures like George Washington and the Prophet Muhammad. Along the way, he explains why minor writers like Irving have their enduring fascinations.

Delving into all that is likable and perplexing about the man once considered America’s most famous writer, A Washington Irving Sketch Book brings Irving closer to today’s readers, capturing the charm of his work and the vicissitudes of literary fashion.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Washington Irving, New Yorker
• An Aside
• Irving Goes Abroad
• The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.
• Rip and Ichabod
• The Sketch Book (Continued)
• A Chosen Vocation
• Among the Painters
• A Misfire
• The Bachelor
• Melancholy Irving
• The Dramatist
• Tales of a Traveller
• Irving’s Journals
• The Life and Voyages of Columbus
• The Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus
• Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada, from the mss. of Fray Antonio Agapida
• The Alhambra: A Gem
• The Diplomat
• Returning to America
• Way Out West: A Tour on the Prairies
• Astoria: Anecdotes of an Enterprise Beyond the Rockies
• The Hack Writer
• Irving vs. Cooper
• Irving and Politics
• The Historian
• The Conquest of Mexico
• Sunnyside
• The Ambassador
• Life of Mahomet
• Life of Oliver Goldsmith
• Coming to Rest: Wolfert’s Roost
• Life of George Washington
• The Afterlife of Washington Irving
• Index