PAULDING’S HOME AT PLEASANT VALLEY, N. Y.
WASHINGTON IRVING
American literature in the strictest sense of the word really began in the city of New York with the publication of Washington Irving’s Knickerbocker History of New York. New York was then the most cosmopolitan of all cities of the New World, as it was the largest. It was a pleasant town of twenty-five thousand people, and it had picturesque traditions; for it was first settled by the Dutch, who had, in a way, taken possession of the Hudson River. They were followed in turn by the English, and still later there was a large influx of French Huguenots. When the Revolution broke out eighteen languages were already spoken in the city of New York. It was natural, therefore, that the literature of imagination, of humor, and of sentiment should find a soil in the cosmopolitan society of the town; and Irving, who was born in the year in which the British troops embarked for England, who declined to go to college, as his brothers had gone, but read law and, probably with greater avidity, books of general literature, and was a lover of nature, had both the temperament and the taste to write gentle satire. He was a born observer and loiterer, a man who saw and felt and meditated. He had the high spirit of youth, and when he returned in 1806 from Europe he was still a young man, and there were some other gifted young men in New York to keep him company. They published anonymously a series of semi-humorous, satirical comments on men, women, and things social, dramatic, and literary, under the title “Salmagundi,” and in these papers Irving’s humor, sentiment, and delightful style were conspicuous. They were followed by the Knickerbocker History of New York, in which the audacious young man broadly burlesqued the ancestors of some of the foremost people in New York. It was good-natured; but it gave great offense. It was, however, the first book of quality and feeling written by an American. In 1815 Irving went to Europe a second time, and did not return until 1832. During that interval he published two books, which made a reputation for him on both sides of the Atlantic, “Bracebridge Hall” and “The Sketch-Book.” These books made the colonists, irritated by their long discussion with England, more tolerant of the mother country, because they recalled places and customs that had been dear to their ancestors, or to their own youth. Thackeray called Irving “the first ambassador whom the new world of letters sent to the old.”
BIRTHPLACE OF COOPER, Burlington, N. J.
The center house is the home of Capt. James Lawrence
OTSEGO HALL, COOPERSTOWN, N. Y.
Cooper’s boyhood home
