KNOWN WITH GOOD REASON as the “Father of American Literature,” Washington Irving (1783–1859) was the first author to produce uniquely American stories, frequently based on local legends, that were read and applauded abroad. He was born in New York City and studied law in a desultory manner, even working (in a minor role) on Aaron Burr’s trial for treason. He was still a teenager when he began contributing to the Morning Chronicle. In 1807, he, his brother William, and James Kirk Paulding began writing sketches collected as Salmagundi, a forerunner of Dickens’s Pickwick Papers. He followed this with A History of New York, purportedly by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809), the first significant American literary work of humor, and, after several lesser works, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent, published in 1819 and 1820, which contains two of the most famous short stories in American literature, though they are based on German legends. In “Rip Van Winkle,” the title character is kind to a dwarf, who gives him a special drink and Rip falls asleep, waking twenty years later. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” which has scared children at Halloween for nearly two centuries, features a headless horseman. Other fantasy stories by Irving were set in the Dutch communities of New York’s mid-Hudson Valley and in Spain, whose legends provided fodder for some of his most chilling supernatural stories.
“The Adventure of the German Student” (also published as “The Lady of the Velvet Collar”) was originally published in Tales of a Traveller (London, John Murray, 1824).