Happy birthday, Washington Irving

It is the birthday of writer Washington Irving (1783), whose short stories Rip Van Winkle (1819) and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820) are his most remembered contributions to American literature, though he also wrote biographies and histories as well. Irving was one of the first American authors to earn a living from his writing. The short stories appeared in a volume The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819). Irving was the first to refer to New York City as Gotham and coined the expression "the almighty dollar." He created the character Diedrich Knickerbocker, an old Dutch historian, as a hoax to promote a book he had written. He ran an ad several times in a local newspaper seeking the "missing" old man. When the man didn't show up, he then ran an ad supposedly from the proprietor of a small hotel vowing to publish a manuscript Knickerbocker had left behind to help  pay his hotel bill. The scheme was wildly successful and the public eagerly snapped up his book when it was published. Today the name Diedrich Knickerbocker refers generally to New Yorkers and lives on in the pro basketball team the New York Knicks.

Van Wyck Brooks was top literary critic

Van Wyck Brooks on Time cover in 1944

It is the birthday of literary historian Van Wyck Brooks (1886), whose detailed study of early American literature, The Flowering of New England (1936), won the Pulitzer Prize for history and the National Book Award. It is notable for placing such writers as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau into historical context, examining the social, religious, and political forces of the nation and the region that affected these literary icons.

The book was part of his Finders and Makers series that covered American literary history from 1800 to 1915. Books from the series also include New England: Indian Summer, 1865-1916 (1940), The World of Washington Irving (1944), The Times of Melville and Whitman (1947), and The Confident Years: 1885-1915 (1952). Indian Summer was well received and was a best seller. Brooks was hailed for his vivid style and clarity. He drew from the letters and other contemporary documents to paint clear pictures of the men and their times.

Brooks' volume, On Literature Today (1941), harshly criticized the likes of Thomas Wolfe, John Dos Passos, and Ernest Hemingway, whose dim views of humankind were in direct conflict with Brooks' desire for literature of affirmation rooted in an abiding faith in human nature.

Brooks graduated from Harvard University in 1908. While he was a student, he published with a friend his first collection of poetry, Verses by Two Undergraduates. He followed that with The Wine of the Puritans (1909), his first book of literary criticism. Brooks wrote that Puritanism had a profound effect on the formation of American culture and ideas.

Brooks also wrote a detailed study of the great American author Samuel L. Clemens in The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920). He blamed the author's shortcomings on Twain's mother and wife.

Happy birthday, Washington Irving

Washington Irving

It is the birthday of historian and author Washington Irving (1783), who is best known for his short stories Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, though he also wrote biographies of Muhammad, Oliver Goldsmith and George Washington as well as books on the Moors of Spain, the Alhambra and Christopher Columbus. Irving's work was popular in Europe and he may have been the first American best-selling author. he was a favorite of Charles Dickens, Lord Byron, Thomas Campbell and Sir Walter Scott. He offered encouragement to such American literary luminaries as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe. Irving's nephew, Theodore Irving, wrote Conquest of Florida, a history of Florida under Hernando de Soto.