Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Writings (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free PDF

on Irving’s conception of The Sketch-Book. Scott’s deep interest in folklore as the foundational element of a national culture confirmed Irving’s intuition that a legend of Sleepy Hollow might merit as much attention as Rob Roy.
    When Irving returned to Liverpool to appear before the Commissioners of Bankruptcy with his brother Peter, he already had decided to pursue a career in literature. His brother William, a congressman back in Washington, D.C., made arrangements for him to serve as first clerk in the Navy Department at a comfortable salary, but Irving declined the post, for he was determined “to raise myself once more by my talents, and owe nothing to compassion” (Williams, vol. 2, p. 260). In a letter of explanation to his brother Ebenezer, he declared, “My talents are merely literary,” and pleaded “to be left for a little while entirely to the bent of my own inclination, and not agitated by new plans for subsistence, or by entreaties to come home” (Irving, vol. 23, p. 541). The brothers honored his request, and by June 1819 the first installment of The Sketch-Book was in print in America. Irving had more difficulty finding a publisher in England and eventually made arrangements to print the first volume at his own expense. The early reviews were positive, praising Irving for his style and recognizing him as that hitherto unheard of thing, a genuine American man of letters. Now confident that the book would pay for itself, London publisher John Murray agreed to take over publication of the remaining volumes, and Irving’s reputation was assured.
    The Sketch-Book marks the apex of Irving’s career. Having declared his independence from his family, he was confident enough to declare independence for American literature as well, which he did overtly in “English Writers on America” (p. 91 ). More importantly, his narrator, Geoffrey Crayon, was a prototypical figure of the American individual. In the opening sketch, “The Voyage,” Crayon’s passage across the Atlantic leaves him doubly detached from family and place. Crossing the Atlantic is like opening “a blank page in existence” that “severs” the chain of memories that otherwise would “[grapple] us to home” (p. 52). His arrival in Liverpool is no joyous return of a prodigal son to the land of his forefathers. It only deepens his isolation. While preparing to disembark from the ship, he witnesses a dying sailor being carried ashore and feels himself “a stranger in the land” (p. 57). The melancholy Irving evokes from Crayon’s situation as an aimless tourist suggests a feeling of placelessness often associated with American individualism. Crayon’s alienation is the other side of Emerson’s self-reliant assertion that “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist” (Emerson, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 2, p. 29). The poignant detachment of Crayon’s point of view anticipates such first-person narrators as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Miles Coverdale, Herman Melville’s Ishmael, or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway. Yet it was Irving’s displacement from home that caused him to imagine Sleepy Hollow as an ideal “retreat, whither I might steal from the world and its distractions, and dream quietly away the remnant of a troubled life” (p. 163).
    Two-thirds of The Sketch-Book is made up of observational essays that fall into the genre of travel literature. Only five of its “sketches” are recognizably what we would call short stories (if we include “The Wife” and “The Mutability of Literature” along with “Rip Van Winkle,” “The Spectre Bridegroom,” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”). Yet it is these few stories that make Irving an innovative artist whom some have called the inventor of the short story in America. As Fred Lewis Pattee observed, Irving “was the first prominent writer to strip the prose tale of its moral and didactic elements and to make of it a literary form