Washington Irving

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Washington Irving

Washington Irving (born April 3, 1783 in New York , † November 28, 1859 in Sunnyside , Tarrytown ) was an American writer .

He first became known in his homeland in the first decade of the 19th century with satires on the society and history of the city of New York, trained on English style models . With his sketchbook (1819–20) he increasingly turned to the influences of European romanticism and thus became the first American writer to be successful in Europe. With the stories contained in this volume Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (Eng. The legend of the sleepy gorge ) Irving founded the genre of the short story .

In later years Irving wrote mainly biographies, including about Christopher Columbus and George Washington .

Life

Origin and youth

Irving's parents were the Scottish emigrant William Irving and his English wife Sarah (née Sanders). In 1763 they had emigrated to New York and had made a modest affluence with a trading company. They had a total of eleven children, three daughters and eight sons; however, three of the sons died as infants. Washington Irving was born the youngest child of the family in the first week of April 1783, when news of the American Revolutionary War armistice reached New York, and was baptized Washington in honor of George Washington , commander of the victorious Revolutionary Forces. At the age of six, Irving is said to have met his namesake in person when his Scottish nanny spotted George Washington, now President of the United States, in a shop on Broadway and introduced him to her ward with the words: “Please, Excellency, here's a bairn that's called after ye! " - Washington is said to have laid hands on the child . Irving, whose last work was to be a monumental Washington biography, has later often underscored the importance of this episode for his life - true or not -. From the age of six to sixteen he went to school with various private teachers, but was a disinterested and poor student.

The career of the five Irving brothers illustrates the emergence of a broad bourgeois middle class in American cities, but also the break with the thoughts of the previous generation. The father William Irving, Sr., was a devout follower of a still strong puritan dominated Calvinism , hoping that at least one of his sons will fasten the priests career, but they were through and through by the enlightened spirit of the American Revolution marked and young republic and alienated increasingly becoming her father in this regard. William, Jr. and Ebenezer Irving eventually became businessmen, Peter Irving became a doctor, and John Irving a lawyer. Washington Irving, as the youngest son, also disliked his father's wishes and began to study law from 1799 - in the absence of a New York State law school as an assistant in the offices of various lawyers and judges.

Beginnings as a writer, 1802–1815

Washington Irving's first publications also fall in the first years of study. His brother Peter Irving increasingly interfered in the political trench warfare between the Federalist and the Democratic-Republican Party , which shaped American politics and especially the then capital New York at the time. In this turmoil he was one of the closest confidants of Vice President Aaron Burr , leader of a third parliamentary group. As the mouthpiece of his politics, Burr founded his own newspaper, the Morning Chronicle , in 1802 and appointed Peter Irving as editor. He then also recruited his younger brother to fill the pages of the paper. Washington Irving published his first works under the pseudonym Jonathan Oldstyle , satires on the political and cultural goings-on in New York's better circles, packed in theater reviews. Oldstyle, portrayed as conservative-sentimental Hagestolz, is the first in a long series of pseudonyms and personas through which Washington tells many of his works. These rather gently satirical Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle were followed in 1804 by a series of explicitly political diatribes against Burr's opponents in the election campaign for New York governorship. They appeared in the Corrector magazine , also run by Peter Irving , but it is difficult to categorize individual articles as the paper had shifted to publishing its polemics anonymously in the worsening political crisis.

In 1804 he interrupted his studies for health reasons and embarked on a grand tour to Europe. He toured France, Italy, Switzerland and England before returning to New York in 1806. He was finally admitted to the bar in November of that year, largely thanks to the leniency of his examiners. However, he soon abandoned his first and only client and never practiced as a lawyer again. Instead, he now pushed his career as a scribe and, together with his brother William Irving and his brother-in-law James Kirke Paulding, founded the satirical magazine Salmagundi , of which a total of twenty issues had appeared up to 1808. In their articles, which were drawn with various pseudonyms, they caricatured the city's political and social elites. Although the targets of their ridicule were made up with fantasy names -  DeWitt Clinton appears as "Linkum Fidelius", Robert R. Livingston as "Christopher Cockloft" - the amused New York audience was able to decipher the allusions with ease. Irving's authorship was an open secret, so that he was able to gain a reputation as a satirist during these years, but this hardly had an impact beyond the city limits of New York.

In April 1809, Matilda Hoffmann died unexpectedly at the age of seventeen, to whom Irving had lost his heart. This unhappy love was often described in an extraordinarily sentimental way by Irving's biographers, especially in the 19th century; in fact, Irving's remarks on this allow the conclusion that this stroke of fate hit him hard and darkened his mind lastingly; he was to remain a bachelor until the end of his life . First, however, he sought consolation in writing and published his History of New York only a few months after Hoffman's death under the alias "Diedrich Knickerbocker" . With recourse to a large number of historical and literary sources, Irving was superficially targeting the history of the colony of Nieuw Nederland and its governors; on a second level, the work is a biting satire of contemporary American politics, particularly the person of incumbent President Thomas Jefferson . With the enormous success of the work, Irving became the undisputed outstanding writer of New York, if not the United States; the book also received some attention in England. It also secured his livelihood, after just a year sales revenues were $ 2000.

In view of this success, it seemed appropriate to his older brothers to promote his talent - in 1810 they made him a partner in the family business with few, mostly representative duties, so that he could produce further masterpieces at his leisure. However, it remained a pious wish, because, whether out of sheer indolence or because of a writing inhibition , his literary production almost came to a standstill in the next few years. Towards the end of 1812 he accepted when he was offered the position of editor of Analectic Magazine , but in the two years in this position he wrote only a few, sometimes very sentimental or solemn essays that barely hint at the chutzpah of his early satirical work.

Years in Europe, 1815-1832

Memorial plaque to Washington Irving in Seville.
Monument to Washington Irving in the Alhambra (Granada)

In May 1815 he embarked for England to help his brother Peter run the English branch of the Irving family business; not until 1832 was he supposed to return to America. The first years in England were a depressing experience for Irving - he tried in vain for three years to consolidate the company's finances until it finally went bankrupt in 1818. Irving found himself destitute in a strange land. He was offered several government positions, but he decided to make writing a profession and earn a living from literature - no American writer had done this before; most recently Charles Brockden Brown failed in the attempt. Inspired by the example of Walter Scott , whom Irving visited at his country estate in Abbotsford in Scotland in 1817 and with whom he has been a close friend since then, he began to write his “ sketchbook ”, which was published in 1819/20 in America, 1820, initially in seven individual issues then appeared in book form in England. It was a huge success on both sides of the Atlantic, was soon translated into several languages, and made Irving the first internationally acclaimed American writer. The most famous short story in the sketchbook is probably Rip Van Winkle . It tells of the Dutch settler Rip van Winkle, who, on the run from his domineering wife, falls asleep through a magic potion in the Catskill Mountains of New York and only wakes up after twenty years. When he returns to his village, he finds that his wife and most of his cronies have died; In addition, Rip slept through American independence. The story is based on a German legend that has been handed down in several variations. The short story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is also basically plagiarism; it is based on Gottfried August Bürgers Lenore and a fairy tale collected by Johann Karl August Musäus . In many other sketches there is a romanticized, almost kitschy picture of Europe. There is a certain nostalgia in Irving's tone because he is aware that this "old" Europe is disappearing. It is similar with the essay Traits of Indian Character , in which Irving describes the Indians of North America in the tradition of Rousseau and many others indiscriminately as " noble savages ". After all, Irving was one of the first writers to condemn the whites' persecution of the Indians.

The successor Bracebridge Hall appeared in 1822 , a collection of short stories and a sequel to his sketchbook , then in 1824 Tales of a Traveler , which also mostly dealt with European motifs. Irving studied Spanish history in depth in the years that followed. In the short story Adventures of the Black Fisherman , Irving dedicates himself to the subject of the Flying Dutchman for the second time after his story The Storm-Ship from his work Bracebridge Hall , but this time in the form of the Davy-Jones modification.

His biography of Columbus , which was published in 1828, was partly fictional, and founded the belief, which is still widespread today, that medieval scholars did not imagine the earth as a sphere but as a flat disk , and Columbus wanted to prove the opposite by traveling west. In 1829 Irving published A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada , and after his visit to the Alhambra in Granada in 1829, the short story collection Tales of the Alhambra . In these works he condemned the barbarism of the Christian Reconquista against the high culture of the Moors .

Return to New York

In 1832 he returned to New York after seventeen years and was received like a hero: a dinner was held for him in the New York City Hotel, and numerous dignitaries gave speeches on his well-being. As soon as he arrived, Irving set out to accompany the Federal Commissioner for Indian Affairs , James Ellsworth , on a journey through the American West. The opening up of the frontier and the fur trade became the dominant themes of his following works: He published the impressions of his journey as A Tour of the Prairies in The Crayon Miscellany (1835). In 1836 he published Astoria (1836), a commissioned work for the magnate John Jacob Astor on the history of the Astoria trading post founded by his Pacific Fur Company and named after him . Through Astor, Irving also met the adventurer Benjamin Bonneville , about whom he published his third book on the American West in 1837 : The Adventures of Captain Bonneville (1837). The fact that Irving mainly dealt with American topics after his return from Europe is certainly also a consequence of the harsh criticism he was exposed to from many American writers. In particular, James Fenimore Cooper and Philip Freneau ( To a New England Poet , 1832) accused Irving of alienating himself from his homeland and of conforming to courtly circles.

The National Academy of Design elected Washington Irving an honorary member in 1841. In 1842 he was appointed United States Ambassador to Spain; In 1846 he finally returned to the USA. In 1829 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society and in 1855 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . He wrote biographies about Oliver Goldsmith , Mohammed and 1855-59 a five-volume work about his namesake George Washington . A fifteen-volume work edition was published during his lifetime (1848–51).

reception

Washington Irving and his literary friends - this 1864 engraving shows a meeting of the great contemporary writers of the United States in Washington Irving's library. The portrayal of Irving as the host and center of this never-taking summit of American literature underscores the high status it had in the 19th century.
Pictured from left to right are: Henry Theodore Tuckerman , Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. , William Gilmore Simms , Fitz-Greene Halleck , Nathaniel Hawthorne , Henry Wadsworth Longfellow , Nathaniel Parker Willis , William Hickling Prescott , Washington Irving, James Kirke Paulding , Ralph Waldo Emerson , William Cullen Bryant , John Pendleton Kennedy , James Fenimore Cooper , George Bancroft .

Washington Irving has not been in the favor of literary critics since the 20th century, but during his lifetime he was, alongside James Fenimore Cooper, the most widely read American writer internationally. He was the first to make a living from his books - Charles Brockden Brown had failed in his attempt to make writing a profession around 1800.

Irving is of particular importance for the development of short stories : Although there were fictional short prose even before Irving and a definition of short story - differentiated from anecdote, fairy tale or novella - is openly discussed in literary studies to this day, Irving is generally considered to be “Inventor” of the short story, a genre that, unlike in German or English, has achieved great popularity, especially in American literature. It was called Short Story later; Irving himself referred to his short prose pieces as sketches & short tales. Although Irving published a prose story in The Little Man in Black (in Salmagundi ) as early as 1807 , three pieces from the sketchbook, namely Rip Van Winkle , the legend of Sleepy Hollow and the now hardly read play The Specter Bridegroom , are generally considered to be first American Literature Short Stories.

Both Rip van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow have gone down in American folklore and popular culture and are still familiar and often parodied material to many Americans today. The five Christmas sketches in the Sketch Book also had a particular influence - they made a significant contribution to the revaluation of Christmas and the revival of Christmas customs. Charles Dickens specifically appreciated the influence of these Christmas sketches on his A Christmas Carol (1843). Irving also coined two nicknames for New York and its residents that are still common today: Gotham City , first used in Salmagundi in 1807 , was still in common parlance as a name for New York in the 19th century and is today mainly due to the Batman comics known. On the other hand, the name of New Yorkers as Knickerbocker is a bit old , based on the name of Irving's alter ego in the history of New York and Rip Van Winkle, but is at least alive in the name of the traditional basketball team New York Knicks .

Irving's influence can also be demonstrated in European literature, especially in 19th-century German and Russian literature (although in English literature it was hardly original enough to be copied). Particularly noteworthy here is Irving's influence on Alexander Pushkin , whose famous “ fairy tale of the golden rooster ” is based on the “legend of the Arab astrologer” from Irving's Alhambra , as Anna Akhmatova explained in 1933. Since the 1920s, in Soviet Russia and in the United States, various works have shown that the narrative position and the subject of Belkin's stories and the fragment “The story of the village of Gorjuchino” by Pushkin were in many respects Irving's “History of the City of New York “Are modeled on, but this knowledge has been purposefully suppressed in the Soviet Union since the 1940s with the escalation of the Cold War and growing hostility towards the USA. More recently, the thesis has been put forward that the plot of Pushkin's The Iron Rider was taken from Irving's legend of the sleepy ravine .

Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow have been filmed several times, the latter story, among others, in 1949 as a segment of the Walt Disney -Zeichentrickfilms The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad ( The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad ), and in 1999 under the direction of Tim Burton with Johnny Depp and Christina Ricci in the lead roles. In Germany the film was released as Sleepy Hollow . The science fiction epic Buck Rogers is also based on the story of Rip van Winkle .

Works

  • Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent. (1802)
  • Salmagundi (1807, with William Irving and JK Paulding)
  • A History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809, Diedrich Knickerbocker's humorous history of the city of New York )
  • The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent (1819–20, German The Sketchbook )
  • Bracebridge Hall (1822)
  • Tales of a Traveler (1824, German tales of a traveler )
  • A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828, dt. The history of life and the Christopher Columbus Travel )
  • The Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada (1829)
  • Tales of the Alhambra (1829, The Alhambra )
  • The Companions of Columbus (1831, German journeys of the companions of Columbus )
  • A Tour on the Prairies (1835, German journey through the prairies )
  • Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey (1835, report of his trips to Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey )
  • The Crayon Miscellany (3 vol., 1835)
  • Astoria (1836, German Astoria )
  • Essays and Sketches (1837)
  • The Adventures of Captain Bonneville (1837, German Captain Bonneville )
  • The Life of Oliver Goldsmith (1840, Oliver Goldsmith. A biography )
  • Mahomet and His Successors (1849, German The Life of Mohammed ) E-Text (German) gutzitiert.de
  • The Life of George Washington (5 vol., 1855–59, German life story of George Washington )

literature

Work editions

The authoritative edition of the work today is:

  • Henry A. Pochmann , Herbert L. Kleinfield, Richard D. Rust (Eds.): The Complete Works of Washington Irving. 30 volumes. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison (Volumes I-III) / Twayne, Boston (Volumes IV-XXX) 1969–1986.

The three anthologies that the Library of America has dedicated to Irving so far are based on this edition :

  • James W. Tuttleton (Ed.): History, Tales and Sketches: The Sketch Book, A History of New York, Salmagundi, Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent. The Library of America, New York 1983, ISBN 0-940450-14-3 .
  • Andrew B. Myers (Ed.): Bracebridge Hall, Tales of a Traveler, The Alhambra. The Library of America, New York 1991, ISBN 0-940450-59-3 .
  • James P. Ronda (Ed.): Three Western Narratives: A Tour on the Prairies, Astoria, The Adventures of Captain Bonneville. The Library of America, New York 2004, ISBN 1-931082-53-7 .

There are also a number of older editions of works, most of which go back to the last edition reviewed by Irving himself ( Author's Revised Edition ), which first appeared in fifteen volumes from 1848–1851 by the New York publishing house George P. Putnam. In 1860, one year after Irving's death, it was expanded by six volumes ( Salmagundi and the five volumes of Life of George Washington ) to form the New Author's Revised Edition . Later Putnam editions were supplemented by the miscells that Irving's nephew Pierre M. Irving first published in 1860 ( Spanish Papers and Miscellanies , 2 volumes). In the 19th century, Putnam Irving's works were reissued in whole or in part: the Riverside Edition (21 volumes) was published in parallel in 1850–1860, the Kinderhook Edition (28 volumes) in 1850–1880 , and the Knickerbocker Edition (27 volumes) in 1869 –83 the Geoffrey Crayon Edition (27 volumes), 1881 the Spuyten Duyvil Edition (12 volumes), 1882 the Hudson Edition (27 volumes), 1891 another Knickerbocker Edition (40 volumes) and 1895 the Autograph Edition (40 volumes). Further Putnam editions followed in the 20th century, along with countless pirated prints on both sides of the Atlantic .

Translations
Biographies
Monographs and Articles
  • Ralph M. Aderman: Critical Essays on Washington Irving. Hall, Boston 1990, ISBN 0-8161-8896-3 .
  • Peter Antelyes: Tales of Adventurous Enterprise. Washington Irving and the Poetics of Western Expansion. Columbia Univ. Pr., New York a. a. 1990, ISBN 0-231-06860-3 .
  • Birgit Behrendt: Spain pictures with Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and Washington Irving. Comparative studies on motifs of romanticism. Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-631-51818-8 . (Studies and documents on the history of Romance literatures. Vol. 52)
  • Edwin T. Bowden (Ed.): Washington Irving. Bibliography. Twayne, Boston 1989, ISBN 0-8057-8526-4 .
  • Mary Weatherspoon Bowden: Washington Irving. Twayne, Boston 1981. (Twayne's American authors series 379)
  • Helmbrecht Breinig: Irving's short prose, art and art problems in narrative and essayistic work. Herbert Lang, Bern 1972, ISBN 3-261-00789-3 . (European University Theses. Series 14, Anglo-Saxon Language and Literature. Vol. 6)
  • Heiner Bus: Studies on Washington Irvings travel prose. "The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Ghent." (1819/20); "A Tour on the Prairies" (1835) and "The Creole Village. A Sketch from a Steamboat" (1837). Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1982, ISBN 3-8204-5946-4 . (Mainz Studies in American Studies. Vol. 15)
  • William L. Hedges: Washington Irving. An American Study, 1802-1832. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 1965.
  • John T. Jacobs: The Western Journey. Exploration, Education, and Autobiography in Irving, Parkman, and Thoreau. Garland, New York 1988, ISBN 0-8240-6394-5 .
  • Lewis Leary : Washington Irving. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1963.
  • Philip MacFarland: Sojourners. Atheneum, New York 1979, ISBN 0-689-11003-0 .
  • Andrew B. Myers (Ed.): A Century of Commentary on the Works of Washington Irving. 1860-1974. Sleepy Hollow Restorations, Tarrytown NY 1976, ISBN 0-912882-28-X .
  • Walter A. Reichart: Washington Irving and Germany. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 1957. (Reprint: Greenwood Press, Westport Conn 1972, ISBN 0-8371-6459-1 )
  • Martin Roth: Comedy and America. The Lost World of Washington Irving. Kennikat Press, Port Washington NY 1976, ISBN 0-8046-9132-0 .
  • George Sanderlin: Washington Irving. As Others Saw Him. Coward McCann and Geoghegan, New York 1975, ISBN 0-698-20296-1 .

Web links

Commons : Washington Irving  - Album containing pictures, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: Washington Irving  - Quotes
Wikisource: Washington Irving  - Sources and full texts
Wikisource: Washington Irving  - Sources and full texts (English)

Remarks

  1. ↑ Williams: The Life Washington Irving. Vol. I, p. 3.
  2. ^ Wagenknecht: Washington Irving: Moderation Displayed. P. 3.
  3. ↑ Williams: The Life of Washington Irving. Vol. I, pp. 10-14.
  4. ↑ Williams: The Life of Washington Irving. Vol. I, pp. 5-6.
  5. ↑ Williams: The Life of Washington Irving. Vol. I, pp. 23-26.
  6. ^ Nancy Isenberg : Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr , Penguin, New York 2008, pp. 249-53.
  7. ↑ Williams: The Life of Washington Irving. Vol. I, pp. 35-41.
  8. ↑ See: Martin Roth: Washington Irving's Contributions to THE CORRECTOR. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1968. and Wayne R. Kime: Pierre M. Irving's Account of Peter Irving, Washington Irving, and the Corrector. In: American Literature 43: 1, 1971, pp. 108-114.
  9. ↑ Williams: The Life of Washington Irving. Vol. I, pp. 44-73.
  10. ↑ Williams: The Life of Washington Irving. Vol. I, p. 83 and p. 400, fn. 61.
  11. ↑ Williams: The Life of Washington Irving. Vol. I, pp. 102-107.
  12. ↑ Williams: The Life of Washington Irving. Vol. I, pp. 108-118.
  13. ↑ Williams: The Life of Washington Irving. Vol. I, p. 124.
  14. ↑ Williams: The Life of Washington Irving. Vol. I, pp. 136-141.
  15. ↑ nationalacademy.org: Past Academicians "I" ( Memento from January 16, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) (accessed on May 19, 2015)
  16. ^ Member History: Washington Irving. American Philosophical Society, accessed October 9, 2018 .
  17. ↑ For more information on printing, see a Princeton University blog: The Sensation of the Day is the Great National Painting . ( Memento from August 20, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  18. ^ For example, in Fred L. Pattee: Development of the American Short Story: An Historical Survey. Harper & Brother, New York 1923, p. 1: The American short story began in 1819 with Washington Irving. Short fiction there had been before The Sketch Book […] All of it is negligible: none of it influenced the evolution of the short story. A study of the form in its American phases begins with Irving.
  19. ↑ I have preferred adopting a mode of sketches & short tales rather than long work, because I chose to take a mode of writing peculiar to myself; rather than fall into the mode or school of any other writer; and there is a constant activity of thought and a nicety of execution required in writings of the kind, more than the world appears to imagine ... Quoted in: Martin Scofield: The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story. Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 6.
  20. ↑ Анна Ахматова: Последняя сказка Пушкина. In: Звезда 1, 1933, pp. 161–176.
  21. ^ John C. Fiske: The Soviet Controversy over Pushkin and Washington Irving. In: Comparative Literature 7: 1, 1955, pp. 25–31.
  22. ↑ Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy: Pushkin's The Bronze Horseman and Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow": A Curious Case of Cultural Cross-Fertilization? In: Slavic Review 58: 2, 1999, pp. 337-351.
personal data
SURNAME Irving, Washington
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH April 3, 1783
PLACE OF BIRTH new York
DATE OF DEATH November 28, 1859
Place of death Sunnyside , Tarrytown, New York