Washington Irving (redirected from Dietrich Knickerbocker)

Irving, Washington 

Born Apr. 3, 1783, in New York City; died Nov. 28, 1859, in Tarrytown. American writer; initiator of romanticism and the short story genre in the literature of the USA.

Son of a Scottish-born merchant who had taken part in the North American War of Independence of 1775–83, Irving made his literary debut with a series of humorous sketches on American life. His History of New York (1809), written by the fictitious Diedrich Knickerbocker, is a burlesquely comic chronicle of the city of New York when it was still a small Dutch settlement. The Sketch Book (1819–20) is a medley of short stories, essays, and articles. His Bracebridge Hall (1822) is a book that offers scenes from the lives of residents of a patriarchal English estate. In the Tales of a Traveller (1824) Irving condemned hypocrisy and Puritan intolerance. In the collection The Alhambra (1832) quaint fantasy is no obstacle to his denunciation of despotism. Astoria (1836), however, is a work in which Irving idealizes capitalist expansion westward.

WORKS

Works, vols. 1–12. New York, 1910.
In Russian translation:
Rasskazy i legendy. Moscow-Leningrad, 1939.
Novelty. Moscow, 1954.

REFERENCES

Istoriia amerikanskoi literatury, vol. 1. Moscow-Leningrad, 1947.
Sherstiuk, V. F. “Novelly V. Irvinga 20-kh gg.” Uch. zap. Moskovskogo
oblastnogo ped. in-ta: Zarubezhnaia literatura, 1963, vol. 130.
Warner, C. D. Washington Irving. Port Washington (N. Y.) [1968].

B. A. GILENSON