7 - Washington Irving

Summary

Washington Irving has as good a claim as anyone to the title “Father of American Literature.” Born in 1783, the year the United States won its freedom, and named for the military hero venerated as the Father of His Country, Irving was the first American to make a successful vocation of authorship. Although contemporaries both at home and abroad recognized his seminal importance as the man who declared the nation's literary independence, later readers have dealt less kindly with Irving. Most have ignored his claims to precedence and dismissed him as inherently less interesting and “modern” than either James Fenimore Cooper, who followed him historically, or Charles Brockden Brown, who never attracted a popular readership. “Father of American Literature,” in this sense, implies that Irving belonged to an outdated phase of culture – archaic and pre-Romantic, too remote to engage twentieth-century sensibilities.

Much in Irving's career and work lends support to this view. He portrayed himself as an antiquated gentleman and idler who felt out of place in the bustling present and had no interest in the commercial side of letters. Avoiding the novel, the genre of a modernizing civilization, he worked in forms – the essay serial, the sketch, the history – that now seem old-fashioned or somehow inappropriate for a creative artist. His writing remained imprinted with the “residual” features of eighteenth-century culture: anonymity, collaboration, regard for factuality coupled with uneasiness about originality, and an understanding of literature as communal possession.