Complete Fictional Works of Washington Irving (Illustrated)

BOOK: Complete Fictional Works of Washington Irving (Illustrated)
3.59Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

 

The Complete Works of

WASHINGTON
IRVING

(1783-1859)

Contents

The Short Story Collections

THE SKETCH BOOK OF GEOFFREY CRAYON, GENT.

BRACEBRIDGE HALL

TALES OF A TRAVELLER

TALES OF THE ALHAMBRA

THE CRAYON MISCELLANY

WOLFERT’S ROOST

The Short Stories

LIST OF SHORT STORIES IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

LIST OF SHORT STORIES IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER

The Satires

LETTERS OF JONATHAN OLDSTYLE, GENT.

A HISTORY OF NEW YORK

The Plays

ABU HASSAN

THE WILD HUNTSMAN

The Poetry

POETRY INTRODUCTION by William R. Langfeld

LIST OF POEMS

The Non-Fiction

A TOUR ON THE PRARIES

CHRONICLE OF THE CONQUEST OF GRANADA

ASTORIA

THE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN BONNEVILLE. THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS

LIFE OF OLIVER GOLDSMITH

LIFE OF GEORGE WASHINGTON: VOLUME I

The Criticism

ELIA, AND GEOFFREY CRAYON by William Hazlitt

SPEECH: NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 18, 1842 by Charles Dickens

A FABLE FOR CRITICS by James Russell Lowell

POE, IRVING, HAWTHORNE by George Parsons Lathrop

CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN WASHINGTON IRVING AND EDGAR ALLAN POE

The Biographies

WASHINGTON IRVING by Henry W. Boynton

WASHINGTON IRVING by Charles Dudley Warner

© Delphi Classics 2014

Version 2

The Complete Works of

WASHINGTON
IRVING

By
Delphi
Classics, 2014

Interested in classic American literature?

Then you’ll love these eBooks…

For the first time in digital publishing history, Delphi Classics is proud to present the complete works of these American masters.

www.delphiclassics.com

The Short Story Collections

William Street
,
Tarrytown
,
New York
— the site of
Irving
’s birthplace

New York was a small city at the time of Irving’s birth, with only 23,000 inhabitants. He was born in lower
Manhattan
– the island in the right hand corner.

THE SKETCH BOOK OF GEOFFREY CRAYON,
GENT
.

This is a collection of 34 essays and short stories published in serial format from 1819 to 1820. The collection includes
Irving
’s two most famous works,
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
and
Rip Van Winkle
. The collection also marks
Irving
’s first use of the pseudonym “Geoffrey Crayon,” which he continued to employ throughout his literary career.
The Sketch Book
became one of the first widely read works of American literature in
Britain
and
Europe
, helping to promote the reputation of other American writers to international audiences.

The stories range from sentimental pieces such as
The Wife
and
The Widow and Her Son
to picaresque romps with
Little Britain
and the humorous
The Mutability of Literature
. However, the collection’s most noticeable feature is the inimitable personality of
Irving
’s narrator, Geoffrey Crayon. Scholarly and charming, though sensitive enough not to obstruct his tales with his own character, Crayon was the collection’s immediate attraction for the reading public.

Irving
had started writing the tales shortly after moving to
England
, where he hoped to preserve his family’s trading business in 1815. When the business suffered bankruptcy in 1817,
Irving
was left with no position and very few prospects. He tried at first to serve as an intermediary between American and English publishers, searching for English books to reprint in
America
and vice versa, with little success. In the autumn of 1818,
Irving
’s brother William, sitting as a Congressman from
New York
, secured for him a political appointment as chief clerk to the Secretary of the U.S. Navy, and urged his younger brother to return home. Irving instead decided to remain in England and take his chances as a writer, announcing at the time, “I shall not return home until I have sent some writings before me that shall, if they have merit, make me return to smiles, rather than skulk back to the pity of my friends.”

Having spent late 1818 and the early part of the following year working tirelessly on a collection of short stories and essays,
The Sketch Book
was eventually published in 1819 to critical acclaim. In
Scotland
, the world literary figure Sir Walter Scott was a great admirer of
Irving
’s writing, advising John Murray to publish his work. The collection was an immediate commercial success, winning fame and popularity for
Irving
and establishing his reputation on both sides of the
Atlantic
. Lord Byron was quoted as saying, “I know it by heart”, while Sir Walter Scott reviewed the work as “positively beautiful”.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
has since become one of the most influential ghost stories of the early nineteenth century. Set in
1790 in
the countryside around the Dutch settlement of
Tarry
Town
, Sleepy Hollow is renowned for its ghosts and haunting atmosphere. Legends tell of the spectre of the Headless Horseman, believed to be the ghost of a Hessian trooper, killed during the American Revolutionary War and who “rides forth to the scene of battle in nightly quest of his head”.

The story concerns the tale of Ichabod Crane, a lean and superstitious schoolmaster from
Connecticut
, who competes with Abraham “Brom Bones” Van Brunt, the town rogue, for the hand of the beautiful Katrina Van Tassel, the daughter and sole child of a wealthy farmer, Baltus Van Tassel. However, all of their fates are about to be inexplicably entwined in the mystery of the Headless Horseman…

Washington
Irving
by John Wesley Jarvis, c. 1809

BOOK: Complete Fictional Works of Washington Irving (Illustrated)
3.59Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

The old devils: a novel by Kingsley Amis
Rage of Angels by Sidney Sheldon
Allan and the Ice Gods by H. Rider Haggard
Queen of Broken Hearts by Recchio, Jennifer
Rocky by Ellen Miles
True Colors by Kristin Hannah