Washington Irving (1783鈥�1859) is often considered America鈥檚 first professional writer, supporting himself and his family amid the ups and downs of literary fortune. He burst on the scene with his uproarious History of New York, followed by his Sketch Book, a collection of personal essays and short stories that includes 鈥淩ip Van Winkle鈥� and 鈥淭he Legend of Sleepy Hollow.鈥� As an essayist and teacher, Phillip Lopate identifies with Irving, inspired by his humane and elegant prose style, and by Irving鈥檚 courage and persistence in the face of setbacks and his own limitations as a writer.
In this illuminating book, Lopate reflects on Irving and his extensive body of work through a series of warmly sympathetic sketches of his own. Irving was the first American writer to attain international renown, attracting such devoted fans as Charles Dickens and Lord Byron, and while he may have been overrated in his day, he has since become undeservedly neglected. A lifelong bachelor, he was urbane, popular, and socially adept, mixing with royals as well as paupers, yet underneath it all he was a loner and a melancholic. Lopate describes how Irving constantly reinvented himself, first as a satirist, then a belletrist, at times a hack writer, and finally as a serious biographer of figures like George Washington and the Prophet Mohammed. Along the way, he explains why minor writers like Irving have their enduring fascinations.
Delving into all that is likable and perplexing about the man once considered America鈥檚 most famous writer, A Washington Irving Sketch Book brings Irving closer to today鈥檚 readers, capturing the charm of his work and the vicissitudes of literary fashion.
Phillip Lopate is an award-winning nonfiction writer noted for his anthology The Art of the Personal Essay and his essay collections Bachelorhood, Portrait of My Body, Portrait Inside My Head, and A Year and a Day as well as Notes on Sontag (快色直播), Waterfront, and My Affair with Art House Cinema. He is professor emeritus of creative writing at Columbia University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
“It’s hard to imagine a better match of writer and subject than today’s foremost advocate of the personal essay and its first great American practitioner. Phillip Lopate’s big-hearted tribute to the versatile master he calls ‘my ancestor, my doppelganger’ is both a welcome wake-up call for Irving’s long-slumbering reputation and, like Irving’s own sketch book, a joy to read.”—Christopher Benfey, author of A Summer of Hummingbirds
“No one but Phillip Lopate can have written so enthralling a book about a writer, once beloved, whose works have long been unread and forgotten. Exhilarating, sometimes hilarious, erudite, sophisticated, yet characteristically wry and personal, Lopate’s writing has the cunning and richness of sensibility we expect from a first-rate literary intelligence.”—Robert Boyers, author of The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, the Academy, and the Hunt for Political Heresies
“Phillip Lopate is understandably haunted by the versatile, complicated spirit responsible for ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ and so much more that the world has since forgotten. His belletristic reflections are graceful, poignant, colorful, and precise––in a word, Irvingesque.”—Andrew Burstein, author of The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving
“‘Irving was always preparing himself to be forgotten,’ writes Phillip Lopate in this marvelous resurrection. A Washington Irving Sketch Book is as wry, brisk, and charming as a writer beloved by Sir Walter Scott, Dickens, Lord Byron, and Mary Shelley—and neglected by the rest of us—could have hoped. Lopate does not hesitate to insert himself into the life, to take his reader for a walk, to call out his subject’s shortcomings. Polished line by polished line, this is one of those perfect marriages of subject and biographer.”—Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of V茅ra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)
“A meditation on writing by a wonderful writer, Phillip Lopate’s reflections on Washington Irving bring to life America’s first professional author, and with typically capacious and discerning insight, he makes an elegant case for Irving’s creation of the resilient American myths and histories that haunt us still. Like Irving, Lopate writes with enduring charm—and his own very acute, contemporary wit. Not to be missed.”—Brenda Wineapple, author of Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation
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