Washington Irving, father of NYC culture
A new book by Phillip Lopate argues that Washington Irving, the 19th-century author of 'Sleepy Hollow,' is the prototype of the New York writer and a
Washington Irving, the author of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle," was the first American writer to make a profession of his craft. By his death in 1859, the publication Home Journal declared him "by far the most honored man in our country."
Today, barely anyone reads him. The essayist Phillip Lopate discovered a complete set of Irving's works being discarded by Columbia University's library two decades ago. He took them home out of pity, where they gathered dust until he finally began to read. The result is his new book, "A Washington Irving Sketch Book: Reflections on an American Writer," a reappraisal that sees in Irving a long-lost literary doppelgänger and the prototype of a writer's life.
The ubiquitous legacy of a forgotten author
Irving's cultural fingerprints are everywhere. He coined the term "the almighty dollar." He helped establish American Christmas traditions, including the notion of St. Nicholas riding a flying wagon. He popularized 'Gotham' as a nickname for New York City.
He also gave the city its first mascot: a fictional, crotchety old Dutch American historian named Diedrich Knickerbocker. That legacy extends through to this June's N.B.A. championship, as Lopate notes the New York Knicks bear his name. Jalen Brunson, in his shaggy grace and undersized bullishness, is said to have something of old Diedrich about him.
When alive, his influence was inescapable. His fans and friends included First Lady Dolley Madison, Sir Walter Scott, and John Jacob Astor. Even the usually acid Lord Byron wrote of Irving's "The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.," saying, "I know it by heart." Charles Dickens's 1836 début, "Sketches by Boz," was a nod to Irving.
The prototype of the New York bachelor writer
Lopate, an acclaimed essayist and a bachelor himself, came to regard Irving as New York City's original great bachelor. He writes that Irving was "the Carrie Bradshaw of the city’s early gaslamp era." After a medical checkup and a lunch of pork fried rice in lower Manhattan, Lopate found himself wondering how a writer once so celebrated could wind up so forgotten.
He began to consider what chance he has at posterity if someone like Irving can be lost. "I question the whole notion that this or that author no longer 'speaks' to us, no longer 'matters,'" Lopate writes, speaking about Irving, and, perhaps, himself.
Irving was born in New York City on April 3, 1783, the son of a stern Scottish immigrant. According to family lore, he met his namesake, George Washington, in 1789 when his nanny stopped the President on a Manhattan street. Washington placed his hand on the boy's head, little guessing Irving would grow up to write his biography.
The lads of Kilkenny and the birth of a voice
In his early twenties, Irving ran with a crew of nine well-to-do "blades" called the Lads of Kilkenny. The group spent summers in New Jersey "indulging in pranks, drinking orgies, and leapfrogging on the lawn." Some have wondered whether Irving was gay, a speculation Lopate dismisses, though he quotes from suggestive letters. "Marriage is the grave of bachelor intimacies," Irving wrote to a friend after his engagement.
Starting in 1807, the Lads collaborated on a magazine called Salmagundi. It gently skewered New York City life and society. Lopate says it specialized "in the sort of worked-up nonsense that proved quite popular with audiences of the day, being neither solemn nor mean-spirited."
The wry, winking tone was an early iteration of the urbane magazine voice that later powered The New Yorker and Spy. It spoke to a desire to mythologize New York as it became a metropolis.
