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Washington Irving (Biography)

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Popularity: -1 Vote:	A father may turn his back on his child, brothers and sisters may become inveterate enemies, husbands may desert their wives, wives their husbands. But a mother's love endures through all.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	A kind heart is a fountain of gladness, making everything in its vicinity freshen into smiles.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	A tart temper never mellows with age, and a sharp tongue is the only edged tool that grows keener with constant use.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	A woman never forgets her sex. She would rather talk with a man than an angel, any day.
Popularity: 2 Vote:	A woman's life is a history of the affections.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	A woman's whole life is a history of the affections.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	Acting provides the fulfillment of never being fulfilled. You're never as good as you'd like to be. So there's always something to hope for.
Popularity: 2 Vote:	Age is a matter of feeling, not of years.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	An inexhaustible good nature is one of the most precious gifts of heaven, spreading itself like oil over the troubled sea of thought, and keeping the mind smooth and equable in the roughest weather.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	Christmas! 'Tis the season for kindling the fire of hospitality in the hall, the genial fire of charity in the heart.
Popularity: 2 Vote:	Great minds have purposes; others have wishes.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	I am always at a loss at how much to believe of my own stories.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	It embarrasses me to think of all those years I was buying silk suits and alligator shoes that were hurting my feet; cars that I just parked, and the dust would just build up on them.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	It is not poverty so much as pretense that harasses a ruined man - the struggle between a proud mind and an empty purse - the keeping up of a hollow show that must soon come to an end.
Popularity: -2 Vote:	Kindness in women, not their beauteous looks, shall win my love.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortune; but great minds rise above them.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	Love is never lost. If not reciprocated, it will flow back and soften and purify the heart.
Popularity: -2 Vote:	Marriage is the torment of one, the felicity of two, the strife and enmity of three.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is to little.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	One of the greatest and simplest tools for learning more and growing is doing more.
Popularity: -2 Vote:	Resolved, never to do anything which I should be afraid to do, if it were my last of life.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	Rising genius always shoots out its rays from among the clouds, but these will gradually roll away and disappear as it ascends to its steady luster.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	Some minds seem almost to create themselves, springing up under every disadvantage and working their solitary but irresistible way through a thousand obstacles.
Popularity: 2 Vote:	Temper never mellows with age, and a sharp tongue is the only edged tool that grows keener with constant use.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	The easiest thing to do, whenever you fail, is to put yourself down by blaming your lack of ability for your misfortunes.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	The idol of today pushes the hero of yesterday out of our recollection; and will, in turn, be supplanted by his successor of tomorrow.
Popularity: 2 Vote:	The natural effect of sorrow over the dead is to refine and elevate the mind.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	The natural principle of war is to do the most harm to our enemy with the least harm to ourselves; and this of course is to be effected by stratagem.
Popularity: 2 Vote:	The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal - every other affliction to forget: but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open - this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude.
Popularity: 2 Vote:	The tongue is the only instrument that gets sharper with use.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse! As I have often found in travelling in a stagecoach, that it is often a comfort to shift one's position, and be bruised in a new place.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	There is a healthful hardiness about real dignity that never dreads contact and communion with others however humble.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and of unspeakable love.
Popularity: -2 Vote:	There is a serene and settled majesty to woodland scenery that enters into the soul and delights and elevates it, and fills it with noble inclinations.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	There is in every true woman's heart, a spark of heavenly fire, which lies dormant in the broad daylight of prosperity, but which kindles up and beams and blazes in the dark hour of adversity.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	There is in every woman's heart a spark of heavenly fire which lies dormant in the broad daylight of prosperity, but which kindles up and beams and blazes in the dark hour of adversity.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	There is never jealousy where there is not strong regard.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	They who drink beer will think beer.
Popularity: -2 Vote:	Those men are most apt to be obsequious and conciliating abroad, who are under the discipline of shrews at home.
Popularity: -2 Vote:	Who ever hears of fat men heading a riot, or herding together in turbulent mobs? No - no, your lean, hungry men who are continually worrying society, and setting the whole community by the ears.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	Young lawyers attend the courts, not because they have business there, but because they have no business.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	Youth fades; love droops; the leaves of friendship fall; a mother's secret hope outlives them all!

Biography

Washington Irving (April 3, 1783–November 28, 1859) was an American author of the early 19th century.

Irving was born in Manhattan.

A lawyer, he was a member of the American diplomatic staff in Britain and in Spain. He spoke Spanish. He was a prolific essayist who wrote widely respected biographies of George Washington and Muhammad as well as other historical figures. He also wrote books on 15th century Spain dealing with subjects such as Columbus, the Moors, and the Alhambra.

He is said to have humorously invented the idea that everyone before Columbus thought the earth was flat. He is also credited with coining the phrase "the almighty dollar".

Irving traveled on the Western frontier in the 1830s and recorded his glimpses of western tribes in A Tour on the Prairies (1835) and was one of the few 19th century figures to speak out against the mishandling of relations with the Native American tribes by Europeans:
Irving and James Fenimore Cooper were the first writers to earn acclaim in Europe. He is said to have mentored authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Edgar Allan Poe.

He lived in his famous home of Sunnyside, which is still standing just south of the Tappan Zee Bridge. The property and the original house called "Wolfert's Roost" were originally owned by Wolfert Acker, about which he wrote the short story Wolfert's Roost.

It is believed that the city of Irving, Texas was named after him, as are Washington Street and Irving Street in Birmingham. His book Bracebridge Hall was the inspiration for the naming of the town of Bracebridge, Ontario.

Biography

His first book was A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Dietrich Knickerbocker (1809), a sly satire on self-important local history that brought "Knickerbocker" into the American lexicon, and then wider English usage.

Irving left for Europe in 1815. In 1819-1820 he published The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, which included his best known stories, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip van Winkle".
The latter story was written overnight, while Irving was staying with his sister Sarah and her husband, Henry van Wart in Birmingham, England - a place which also inspired some of his other works. Bracebridge Hall or The Humorists, A Medley is based on Aston Hall, there.

Irving wrote The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus in 1828, the Conquest of Granada one year later, and, the Voyages of the Companions of Columbus in 1831.

Irving returned to the U.S. in 1832. Among his subsequent works were three "Western" books, designed at the time to put to rest that his time in England and Spain has not turned him into an American-only-by-birth. His first western book was A Tour on the Prairies, published in 1835; the beginning of Chapter 10 includes the following, interpreted by some literary critics to be a comment on conerns about his public persona:
He second western book was called Astoria; he wrote it during a six-month stay with the then-retired John Jacob Astor. The book was a worshipful account of Astor's attempt to establish a fur trading colony at present-day Astoria, Oregon.

During Irving's stay with Astor, Benjamin Bonneville paid a visit. His tales of his three years in Oregon Country was said to have enthralled Irving. A month or two later, when Irving encountered Bonneville in Washington, D.C., Bonneville, struggling to write about his journey, decided to instead sell his maps and notes to Irving for $1000. Irving used that material as the basis for his 1837 book The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, which most believe to be the best of his three western books.

...(more on Wikipedia)

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Washington Irving".

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