Andrew Burstein
The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving.
Basic Books, 348 pages, $27.50

It is the sad irony of Washington Irving’s career that he was forgotten by the very literary tradition he engendered. Once read by heads of state and ordinary men alike, the genteel New Yorker now rarely elicits interest outside the academy. Louis Napoleon, the future emperor, paid a personal visit to his Tarrytown cottage; Charles Dickens gushed over his single-handed effort to bring American literature out of its infancy. For today’s readers, though, Irving often seems a quaint but ineffectual ancestor whose work is too light to merit much attention.

In his new book, The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving, Andrew Burstein skillfully argues that Irving should be credited with initiating “a national literature where there was thought to be none.” The whimsical stories that brought him fame—“Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”—are centerpieces in an American mythology that did not exist when Irving began writing. As Cervantes had done earlier with Don Quixote, he forged a literary tradition through picaresque tales whose humor points to deeper notions of national identity.

Born into a comfortable family in 1783, just as Manhattan was shedding its bucolic Dutch past, Irving received a sound education but, unlike his older brothers, did not attend Columbia College. He began working in a law office at the age of sixteen, but—as was the case for his entire life—tempered professional