Irvings Sketch Book Author:Washington Irving General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1911 Original Publisher: H. Holt and company Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you... more » can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: DESCRIPTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY The authoritative biography of Irving is The Life of Washington Irving, by his nephew, Pierre M. Irving, originally published (1862) in four volumes by G. P. Putnam's Sons of New York, but later condensed into three. This is valuable as a work of reference, and contains a great number of the author's letters. A briefer life, notably sympathetic in its treatment, is Charles Dudley Warner's Washington Irving, in the American Men of Letters Series (Houghton Mifflin Company). The same author has written also two short studies, in the same appreciative spirit: Washington Irving, an essay prepared as an introduction to the Geoffrey Crayon Edition of Irving's works, and The Work of Washington Irving, published as a separate small volume in Harper's Black and White Series. The last mentioned essay contains a very interesting description of New York City in the time of Irving's boyhood. Other helpful biographies are Washington Irving, by D. J. Hill, in the American Authors Series, and Washington Irving, by H. W. Boyn- ton, in the Riverside Biographical Series. The student is referred also to the pages on Irving by E. W. Morse in Warner's Clasics -- Historians and Essayists, and to the stimulating chapter in Barrett Wendell's Literary History of America. Of the many magazine articles and reviews mention may be made of Thackeray's Nil Nisi Bonum, reprinted in Roundabout Papers; and the articles in the Irving number of The Critic, March 31, 1883. Chapters on places associated with Irving will be found inHamilton W. Mabie's Backgrounds of Literature ...« less