The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving
This is the first full-length biography of the early American literary icon in more than seven decades, and the first ever by a professional historian. It examines Irving’s ignored place in the political world, and enlarges on his dramatic use of nostalgia, sentimentalism and the gothic imagination; it also traces his world travels as a writer and, in later years, as a U.S. ambassador. The Original Knickerbocker provocatively looks at Irving as a lifelong bachelor and one of the chroniclers of nineteenth-century bachelor culture.