1783-1859
American author Washington Irving was born on this day in New York City, he parents were in the merchant business and quite well off; what we would call "upper middle class" today. He was essentially the baby of the family. Several of his older brothers followed father William Irving Sr. into the merchant business, but noticing Washington's penchant to writing; all encouraged him to pursue literary interests in addition to his training in the family trade. They even went so far to help finance a career in writing, the younger Irving had a keen interest in adventure stories and soon became obsessed with the theater as well. When yellow fever broke out in New York City, his parents sent him up river to Tarrytown to escape any possibility that he would contract the disease. Tarrytown and its environs would figure heavily in his later stories; he was particularly fascinated by a little Dutch village not far from Tarrytown called Sleepy Hollow. By the age of 19, he was writing letters to a local New York newspaper under a pseudo name on topics ranging from happenings at the theater and local social "news." Though there is no evidence that he was writing the letters to gain any form of fame, nonetheless, they did bring him his first popular notoriety. By 1804 he began to show signs of ill health, so his brother devised a plan to pay for trip to Europe to both improve his health and to further his education. Never the most studious pupil, though, he irritated particularly his older brother William Jr. for not availing himself of educational opportunities while there, chasing again, his passion for the theater. He was truly one to march by the beat of his own drum. Despite all of this, he was a popular guest wherever he chose to travel through a 2 year period. When he returned to the U.S., he went under tutelage for the law profession--not a career that he had any interest in; he did, however, manage--barely--to pass the bar in 1908. One of the interesting facts of Irving's life was that created with his brothers a lampoon magazine in New York. Salamugundi was created with help from siblings and a friend, and all wrote under outrageous fake names. The magazine is remembered today of affixing the name "Gotham" to New York City in 1807--a pun on the Anglo-Saxon "Goat Town." Ever up to high-jinx, his first major work was pure satire with a fictional historical gag attached to it's publication. A History of New-York From the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty was a spoof piece supposedly written by one Diedrich Knickerbocker; to "advertise" the work, Irving took out a number of ads supposedly placed by a hotel owner, stating that if Mr. Knickerbocker didn't show back up and pay his outstanding hotel bill, the proprietor would publish the manuscript that he had left behind in his room. The whole affair threatened to become serious when even the police began to consider offering a reward for the "missing historian." Irving then went into the profession of editing. He soon found himself on opposing sides with his family with the coming of the War of 1812, which the merchant class did not support--he however was persuaded to enlist in 1814, but he never saw any real action. His family, though, suffered huge personal losses as a result of the war. To help them out for a change, Irving left for London to attempt to salvage what he could for the family business. This kept him in Europe for some 17 years. It was here that he writing took off in droves. Though, his life was filled with far more than writing--he was a dedicated public servant for most of his adult life. He also became one of the very first American writers to be universally admired and well read in Europe; having admirers amongst some of Britain’s top literary figures of the day. Irving's life is, of course, far too vast to cover in a simple post on his birth, that focuses on early film, so links are provided for further reading into his varied and fascinating history. Getting to the films, the first ever made using his work as source material was the short from the year 1896 Rip Passing Over The Mountain, a Rip Van Torn yarn produced by the American Mutoscope Company. In fact, the vast majority of the earliest films of his work were based on his character of Rip Van Winkle. The first film made of his Sleepy Hollow story came in 1908 with The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow, a Kalem film. Although a large number of silent films from his work were made, the vast majority of them were quite early. The last film of his work made during the silent era came in 1922 with the independent The Headless Horseman, a film still available today, starring Will Rogers as Ichabod Crane. It would be 12 years before another production of his work came out with Ub Iwerks animated short classic The Headless Horseman. It would not be until 1949 that another animated short was produced from this same work with Disney's The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow; followed closely by the well known expanded The Adventures Of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949). The first foreign language film made using his work was Spain's Cuenttos de la Alhambra. Probably the best known feature film of his work made to date came out in 1999 with Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow starring Johnny Depp as Crane and Christopher Walken as the Horseman. In 2013 a highly stylized version of that same story appeared as the basis for the television series of the same name. One of the most recent use of his work in film came with a documentary examining the actual historic town of Sleep Hollow, NY itself, in A Journey To Sleepy Hollow released on Halloween in 2016. While the web series "Crane" is the latest venture to make use of his work. Irving died at the age of 76 just after completing his biography of his namesake, George Washington. He died around 9 PM from a massive heart attack in Tarrytown, New York on November 28. He was buried in the cemetery there more recently consecrated, adjacent to the old Dutch burial ground there--his marker being a humble, non-adorned affair. Par his request, the cemetery was renamed Sleepy Hollow and the area of incorporation formally named North Tarrytown, was eventually renamed Sleepy Hollow as well. Two points of trivia about Irving: 1) his international fame lead him to seek some the earliest world wide copyright claims--which greatly influenced the drafting of domestic copyright law; 2) Irving was the "source" of the notion that prior to Columbus' voyage proved that the world was round--stating in his biography of Columbus--that Europeans widely believed the world to be flat before this historic undertaking in sea voyaging (this was not true, and no one knows if this was a joke or not...nevertheless school kids--myself included--were taught this in school).*
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*Please excuse any typos that I missed and did not correct in this, blogger eliminated spellcheck on the the dashboard months ago, and this is my first attempt at writing and editing a piece without it.
