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He made several other trips up the Hudson as a teenager, including an extended visit to Johnstown, New York where he passed through the Catskill Mountains region, the setting for " Rip Van Winkle". It was in Tarrytown he became familiar with the nearby town of Sleepy Hollow, New York, with its Dutch customs and local ghost stories. An outbreak of yellow fever in Manhattan in 1798 prompted his family to send him upriver, where he stayed with his friend James Kirke Paulding in Tarrytown, New York. Irving was an uninterested student who preferred adventure stories and drama, and he regularly sneaked out of class in the evenings to attend the theater by the time he was 14. Several of Irving's brothers became active New York merchants they encouraged his literary aspirations, often supporting him financially as he pursued his writing career. The Irvings lived at 131 William Street at the time of Washington's birth, but they later moved across the street to 128 William St. The President blessed young Irving, an encounter that Irving had commemorated in a small watercolor painting which continues to hang in his home. Irving met his namesake at age 6 when George Washington was living in New York after his inauguration as President in 1789. Irving's mother named him after George Washington. Washington was born on April 3, 1783, the same week that New York City residents learned of the British ceasefire which ended the American Revolution. The Irving family settled in Manhattan, and were part of the city's merchant class.
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Watercolor of Washington Irving's encounter with George Washington, painted in 1854 by George Bernard Butler Jr. Their surviving children were William Jr. Their first two sons died in infancy, both named William, as did their fourth child John. They had eleven children, eight of whom survived to adulthood. They married in 1761 while William was serving as a petty officer in the British Navy. Washington Irving's parents were William Irving Sr., originally of Quholm, Shapinsay, Orkney, Scotland, and Sarah (née Saunders), originally of Falmouth, Cornwall, England. 1.3.4 Secretary to the American legation in London.1.3.2 Bracebridge Hall and Tales of a Traveller.He advocated for writing as a legitimate profession and argued for stronger laws to protect American writers from copyright infringement. He was also admired by some British writers, including Lord Byron, Thomas Campbell, Charles Dickens, Mary Shelley, Francis Jeffrey and Walter Scott.
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Irving was one of the first American writers to earn acclaim in Europe, and he encouraged other American authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe. He continued to publish regularly throughout his life, and he completed a five-volume biography of George Washington just eight months before his death at age 76 in Tarrytown, New York. He temporarily moved to England for the family business in 1815 where he achieved fame with the publication of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., serialized from 1819 to 1820.
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Irving served as American ambassador to Spain in the 1840s.īorn and raised in Manhattan to a merchant family, Irving made his literary debut in 1802 with a series of observational letters to the Morning Chronicle, written under the pseudonym Jonathan Oldstyle.
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His historical works include biographies of Oliver Goldsmith, Muhammad and George Washington, as well as several histories of 15th-century Spain that deal with subjects such as Alhambra, Christopher Columbus and the Moors. He is best known for his short stories " Rip Van Winkle" (1819) and " The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (1820), both of which appear in his collection The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Washington Irving (Ap– November 28, 1859) was an American short-story writer, essayist, biographer, historian, and diplomat of the early 19th century.
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