the legend of hollow story by washington irving

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when a very young Irving was just beginning his literary career, many writers and historians-American and European alike-dismissed the United States as not sufficiently sophisticated to have a history, and certainly too green for ghosts.

If you must call Irving something, you might call him the architect of America’s founding mythology. But for the love of the Headless Horseman, please don’t call him the Father of American Literature-there is no more killing kindness than that shopworn phrase. No one denies, finally, that many of Irving’s best-known characters have themselves become household names: Rip Van Winkle, for example, or Ichabod Crane. Certainly, the absurdist Knickerbocker sensibility of his early satires may be felt in the humor of Twain and Thurber, and even, most recently, the stories of George Saunders and Karen Russell, while his foray into regional literature, America’s first, was followed by that of Sarah Orne Jewett, Mark Twain, and Sherwood Anderson-for starters.

And it must be admitted that Irving’s stories do endure as the first fictional chronicle of the American experience, and that the unorthodox, fantastical sensibilities he displayed in his tales of the Hudson River Valley set the stage for the Romantic and Gothic writers who followed him, including Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, and Whitman. The Bard of Sunnyside, creator of icons and ambassador of letters, was arguably the nation’s first exportable celebrity-and its first professional writer to make his living by his pen. It is true that Irving’s stories of the Hudson River Valley, composed more than 150 years ago, still exert a magnetic pull on the American imagination, and that during his lifetime, and for nearly a century after, Washington Irving was, as he once wrote of his character Diedrich Knickerbocker, “a household word.” Nor can it be denied that Irving’s satires, “sketches,” and histories captivated readers on both sides of the Atlantic. Washington Irving is often tarred with this well-meaning brush, despite the fact that he was by no means the first American fiction writer, nor did he ever publish in that consummate American form: the novel. This is a truism in legend and history alike: Who prefers the dutiful Abraham to his rebellious sons, or Joseph to Jesus? Who-aside from their biographers-remembers the progenitor of Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers, or Marie Curie? There is no faster way to doom an author than to slap him with a patriotic paternity suit. To refer to a writer as the Father of American Literature is the quickest way to consign him to anthologies, and to popular oblivion.

The legend of hollow story by washington irving