Washington Irving

Washington Irving (1783–1859) was born in New York City, the last of eleven children, named for George Washington in the year the Revolutionary War ended. He trained briefly as a lawyer, wrote comic journalism as "Jonathan Oldstyle" and "Diedrich Knickerbocker" (A History of New York, 1809), and spent most of 1815–1832 in Europe, where The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819–1820) — containing both Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow — made him the first American author read seriously on both sides of the Atlantic. He later served as U.S. Minister to Spain (1842–1846) and wrote histories and biographies, including a life of Christopher Columbus and, in his last years, a five-volume biography of George Washington.