Washington Irving

Washington Irving (1783–1859) was born in New York City, the youngest of eleven children, and achieved his first fame with the comic A History of New York (1809), written under the pseudonym "Diedrich Knickerbocker," before The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819–20) — which included "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" — made him internationally famous and the first American writer to earn a living by his pen alone. He spent seventeen years in Europe as a writer and diplomat before returning to serve as U.S. minister to Spain, and his later work turned increasingly to the American frontier: Astoria (1836) recounts John Jacob Astor's Pacific fur-trading venture, and The Adventures of Captain Bonneville (1837) draws on a U.S. Army officer's own journals of the Rocky Mountain fur trade. He died at his estate, Sunnyside, in Tarrytown, New York.