Washington Irving was born in New York in 1873, the son of a British merchant and the youngest of eleven children. He trained as a lawyer, but practised only briefly, preferring to work as a journalist and writer of essays and poems, some of which were published as a book, Salmagundi, in 1808.

In 1809, he introduced the eccentric Dutch character Dietrich Knickerbocker, supposedly a collctor of stories and a historian of the Dutch regime in New York. The Sketch Book, published in 1820, contained essays about life in England, which Irving has recently visited, as well as adaptations of German folk tales, among them Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Spleepy Hollow, which won him international fame.

Irving was appointed diplomatic attache to Spain (1826-9), then secretary to the US Legation in London (1829-32). He continued to write, and his later works included Legends of the Alhambra(1832), A Tour of the Prairies(1835) and a five-volume biography of George Washington, of which the first volume was published in 1855 and the last in 1859, the year of Irving's death.